Research

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Urena, Anthony. 2022. “Relational Risk: How Relationships Shape Personal Assessments of Risk and Mitigation.” American Sociological Review.

Dissertation

Anthony’s dissertation, The Risk Ecology Framework: A Socioecological Analysis of HIV Risk Perception among Black and Latino Men who have Sex with Men, explores how people deemed to be the most "at-risk" come to understand, for themselves, their own relationship to a given illness or disease. Through semi-structured interviews and participant-observation at a health advocacy group, his research specifically examines how HIV-negative Black and Latino men who have sex with men (MSM) are making sense of their place in the contemporary HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this work, he argues that Black and Latino MSM form their HIV risk perceptions by interfacing the lived experience of their social location with their knowledge of HIV. This sensemaking process gives way to diverse framings of risk that individuals employ to understand the threats HIV/AIDS may or may not pose to their bodily health and/or social lives. Individuals can also come to view HIV/AIDS as personally irrelevant or a non-issue, comprising a framing that escapes a definitive rhetoric of "risk" altogether.

The Risk Ecology Framework contends that these multiple framings constitute a variance of perceptions about HIV/AIDS that can influence an individual’s health-relevant behaviors, such as their use of prevention tools and their romantic/sexual partner selection strategies. Throughout this dissertation, Anthony develops and makes the case for a novel socioecological approach for the analysis of risk perception formation. The Risk Ecology Framework elucidates how a person’s perceptions of personal illness & disease risk comprise a consideration of a breadth of threats situated across the individual, relational, cultural, and institutional levels of a person’s social environment.