1Assistant Professor, Department of Child Health Nursing, Govt. College of Nursing, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala
2Principal, Govt. College of Nursing, Kottayam, Kerala
Online published on 30 August, 2018.
HIV is a globally significant threat to children and adolescents as it emerges as a biological, psychological and social problem and has an increased impact on the child and adolescents’ mental health and poses a range of psychosocial challenges to the child, family and caregivers.
To compare the psychosocial wellbeing of HIV-infected and HIV-affected adolescents.
In a cross-sectional study 412 HIV infected (149) and affected (263) adolescents were included. The data was collected using Psychosocial Wellbeing Assessment Scale. The wellbeing was classified as poor, average and good based on mean and standard deviation.
Majority of the both groups (87.2% and 88.2%) belonged to average psychosocial wellbeing. Among infected group 2.7% and none in the affected group reported good psychosocial wellbeing. No significant difference was observed between them for psychosocial wellbeing (mean 51.30, 50.48 and SD 8.64 and 8.57). A significant difference between the groups was observed for spiritual domain (p<0.001) and family relations domain (p<0.05).
Both HIV-infected and affected adolescents have similar psychosocial wellbeing scores. The HIV-affected group suffers the same or slightly larger amount of psychosocial distress than infected adolescents.
Psychosocial wellbeing, HIV infected adolescents, HIV affected adolescents
