I am working at the Perinatal HIV Research Unit of "Bara" hospital in Soweto, South Africa. My primary topic has been assessing the wllingness to participate (WTP) in future HIV vaccine trials of adolescents in South Africa. The idea is that adolescents here are at very high risk of infection due to risky sexual behavior, so any licensed vaccine will have to first be successful in adolescent specific trials. This, of course, will require the recruitment of a large number of high-risk adolescents to participate in these trials, and unfortunately there are a lot of psychosocial inhibitors that determine how willing an individual will be to participate in them. My project aims to combine these factors (both inhibitors and enablers of participation) into a questionnaire/scale that produces a score which indicated how willing a given individual will be.
