Discriminación en mujeres que viven con VIH/SIDA

Although several scales and questionnaires on discrimination have been created, it is currently lacked one addressed to persons living with HIV/AIDS and specifically to women. With the aim of elaborating a questionnaire to assess the discrimination of women living with HIV/AIDS, the semantic field of the feared and perceived discrimination was explored with an interview of five open questions: what do you fear when you are discriminated by being seropositive?, how do you know that you are discriminated?, who discriminates you more?, where are you more discriminated and when are you more discriminated? The interview was applied to 30 women living with HIV/AIDS treated at the Attention to Out-Patients with AIDS and Sexual Transmission Infections Center of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. A systematic content analysis of the responses showed that, in function of the context, between the 57 and the 77% of the participants reported discrimination; and that employment, age, having children, and the time elapsed from the diagnosis mediated differences in the feared and perceived discrimination. On the base of these results, a questionnaire for the evaluation from the feared discrimination and perceived in women living with HIV/AIDS was derived.