Social Change, HIV/AIDS, and Elderly Health and Well-Being in Nepal

a MiCDA Pilot Project Description

Investigators: William Axinn, Dirgha Ghimire

Funding: Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging

This is a study to add HIV/AIDS and elderly health and well-being content to an existing program of research on family change in Nepal. This study builds on the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS), an ongoing program of research that has made numerous contributions to our understanding of the influence of community context on the family. This project will expand on existing data resources to include important measures of the health and well-being of older adults and new measures of sexually transmitted disease and HIV/AIDS prevalence, risk factors, knowledge, and attitudes. Several factors make Nepal vulnerable to a worsening epidemic: high rates of male migration, prostitution, poverty, low socio-economic status of women, illicit drug trafficking and more importantly the decade long armed conflict, which has aggravated the epidemic (UNAIDS 2006; World Bank 2006). This project is particularly timely and appropriate, as HIV/AIDS in Nepal is now considered to be a “concentrated epidemic,” with considerable risks of becoming more widespread (UNAIDS 2006; World Bank 2006).The primary focus will be on how the spread of HIV/AIDS through their communities influences the health and well-being of the elderly. Here we propose to design and pilot a new survey instrument to capture these dimensions. Completion of this pilot project will lead to a proposal for NIH funding to add the new survey instrument to ongoing data collection in Nepal.