Preface
This volume has been five years in the making. In the process, some of the policy applications called for have met with limited success, such as free needle exchange programs in a limited number of American cities, providing condoms to prison inmates, and advertisements that depict same-sex couples. Rather than dating our chapters that deal with such subjects, such policy applications are verifications of the type of research demonstrated here. Furthermore, they indicate the critical need to continue community based research in the various communities threatened by acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)–for these are innumerable and varied in their specific configurations–so that effective programs might be designed, based on the realities lived by the community members and not on the ideological or theoretical bent of central administrators.