Main description:

Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS recognizes HIV as a socially structured disease - its transmission usually requires intimate contact between individuals - and shows how social networks shape high-risk behaviors and the spread of HIV.
The authors recount the groundbreaking use of social network methods, ethnographic direct-observation techniques, and in-depth interviews in their study of a drug-using community in Brooklyn, New York. They provide a detailed documentary of the lives of community members. They describe drug-use, the affects of poverty and homelessness, the acquisition of money and drugs, and social relationships within the group.
Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS shows that social networks and contexts are of crucial importance in understanding and fighting the AIDS epidemic. These findings should revitalize prevention efforts and reshape social policy.

Contents:

1. Introduction. 2. `Learning from Lives'. 3. The Drug Scene and Risk Behaviors in Bushwick. 4. The Very First Hit; with K.A. Atwood. 5. Network Concepts and Serosurvey Methods. 6. The Research Participants and their Behaviors. 7. Personal Risk Networks and High-Risk Injecting Settings of Drug Injectors. 8. Syringe Sharing and the Social Characteristics of Drug-Injecting Dyads. 9. Sexual Networks, Condom Use, and the Prospects for HIV Spread to Non-Injection Drug Users. 10. Sociometric Networks among Bushwick Drug Injectors. 11. Networks and HIV and other Infections. 12. Prevention and Research. 13. Appendix: Methods for Assigning Linkages in Studies of Drug Injector Networks; with G. Ildefonso. References. Index.