This study was carried out to identify the influence of several socio-economic and demographic factors on the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior (KAB) regarding Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) of ever married women in Papua, Bali and DKI Jakarta, the three provinces in Indonesia with the highest prevalence rates of the virus.
The research project was based on the 2007 Indonesia Demographic Health Survey (IDHS) datasets and the 2010 report from the Ministry of Health. This report stated that the level of revalence of HIV/AIDS in Papua was the highest in Indonesia, followed by that of Bali and DKI Jakarta respectively.
Various socio-economic and demographic factors such as, education level, working status, wealth index, age of respondents, age at first intercourse, media exposure, access to condoms, access to information regarding HIV/AIDS, and religion all contributed to the extent of KAB relating to HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, external factors like culture, tourism, and migration had a significant impact up KAB in those three provinces selected.
In addressing the correlation between the selected predictor variables and KAB, the study implemented methods of analysis consisting of three different techniques: univariate analysis
involving frequency distributions; bivariate analysis involving tests of association between the independent and the dependent variables; and multivariate analysis focusing on logistic
regression analysis.
The results of the univariate analysis revealed that while most of the ever married women in DKI Jakarta who had the highest knowledge were fairly knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS
transmission and its prevention compared to Papua and Bali, their sexual risk-taking behavior was still relatively high. Data found that the use of condoms during their last experience of
sexual intercourse was very low in those three provinces.
A number of significant correlations were found both in bivariate and multivariate analyses.
In the bivariate analysis, the ten variables identified had a significant correlation with those three dependent variables, even though their correlation varied for each province. The education level, age at first sexual intercourse, media exposure, access to condoms, and access to information regarding HIV/AIDS were found to have a strong correlation with knowledge of HIV/AIDS. On the other hand, there were no variables identified in the analyses which had a significant association with attitude, except religion in Papua.
Furthermore, the results showed that education level, wealth index, media exposure, access to condoms, and access to information regarding HIV/AIDS had an extremely high correlation
with behaviour.
Two variables were identified as having a significant correlation in the multivariate analysis, namely, access to condoms and access to information regarding HIV/AIDS, while access to
condoms was the only variable identified as having a strong correlation with behaviour in those three provinces. Surprisingly, no predictor variables had any significant correlation
with attitude in the multivariate analysis.
The overall findings of this research indicated that HIV/AIDS knowledge alone did not determine sexual behavior; other factors worked to make women who were knowledgeable about the risks of HIV infection behave contrary to their knowledge. One of the possible explanations could be that several external factors, such as culture, tourism, and migration, influenced KAB concerning HIV/AIDS in those three provinces which had a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The study also found the predictor variables considered in this analysis had no
correlation with attitude. However this study suggests that there are some external factors which could not be considered in this research because of lack of relevant information in the
IDHS survey, may have strong influences in overall KAB.