PEER was used in Trinidad to provide evidence for the design of a programme aiming to address issues around transactional sex among young urban women. Key findings include:
- Sexual relationships and financial benefits are intimately linked within all relationships, even those defined primarily as romantic. Since concurrent partnerships (individuals having relationships with more than one partner at the same time) were commonplace among this population, the focus of the study was shifted to understanding how patterns of concurrent relationships are managed and maintained.
- Young women saw money as the main motivator to form and maintain sexual relationships. This was not necessarily due to basic economic survival needs, but rather due to equally important social survival. To do this, women need to maintain their image, the financial costs of which drive a perceived need for concurrent partners.
- The level of control women had in relationships (including ability to use condoms with partners) depended on the type of partner. While young women are often able to insist on condom use with ‘outside men’ (partners other than the ‘personal’ man), it is not the norm with ‘personal’ partners (live-in partner, or partner they spend the most time with).
- Strategies of concurrency require a high degree of skilled management, which should not be under-estimated. The cell-phone is central to juggling schedules with outside men and ensuring that such relationships remain clandestine.
- Women are largely unconcerned about HIV infection, particularly when compared to the two greatest perceived risks, which are being publicly ‘horned’ (cheated on) and getting pregnant. Pregnancy prevention was identified as the main motivation for using condoms, when they are used.
- There is little evidence of consistent condom use. When condoms are used, it is usually with outside men and at the beginning of the relationship. Condoms are sometimes reintroduced into relationships with personals when one partner suspects the other of hornin’ (cheating). In this regard, condom use is considered a ‘demotion’ from trusted status, or punishment for hornin’ and getting caught.
The young women involved in the study also produced collages from magazine photos illustrating their everyday lives: their tastes, motivations, worries, fashions. Visual outputs and narrative data help to create communications that are meaningful to the target audience. It is important that ‘the look’, language and vocabulary of communications is authentic. The nuances and accessible detail produced by the study prompted one Trinidadian marketer to remark ‘This is really amazing information… if any commercial entity had this profiling information, they could really develop their own campaigns with this… don’t hand out this methodology because the commercial guys will be using it!’
The PEER process did not stop after the workshops had finished. PSI saw PEER as ‘opening the door’ to working with this target audience. Since the PEER study, they have had extensive, ongoing engagement with peer researchers: they are currently leading a pilot peer education intervention to look at issues around concurrent partnerships, and they developed their own performance indicators for the intervention.
