AEGiS-APPJ: The Crisis of Communicating in Relationships: Confronting the Threat of AIDS

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

The Crisis of Communicating in Relationships: Confronting the Threat of AIDS

AIDS & Public Policy Journal 4, no. 1 (1989): 10-19
Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen and Paula Michael-Johnson

In this paper, we (1) describe the assumptions that can be made concerning the role of talk about sensitive relationship issues among intimates; (2) describe how college students talk about AIDS in romantic relationships; (3) present the reasons they give for not talking about AIDS in their relationships; and (4) identify alternative information-gathering and decision-making strategies used by the college students we studied. In the latter part of the paper we examine the implications of these findings for public policy. A primary goal of this paper is to determine whether the theoretical assumptions about relationship talk described in item 1 above are supported by students' own accounts of their talk about AIDS.
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APPJ894103

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