How do different educational systems available in bosnia & herzegovina impact individuals' views, perceptions & knowledge about the HIV virus & those infected with it?

This IA aims to examine how different educational structures in the Balkans portray HIV and how that impacts individuals' opinions, through the following research question: How do different educational systems available in Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH) impact individuals' views, perceptions and knowledge about the HIV virus and those infected with it?

I will use the Area of Inquiry of Health, Illness, and Healing, which endeavours to holistically and critically analyse cultural aspects of health and illness. As social norms and beliefs(related to sexual health) are central to my research, this AOI is fitted by key concept of Belief and Knowledge. I will try not to limit myself to understanding solely the coexistence of different systems of beliefs in those institutions, but I will aim for unlocking how are those systems produced as a part of academic and social acquisitions students undertake in schools. Similar research has been done by Jarrett Zigon, in his ethnography HIV is God's Blessing, where he explores sexual health discourses developed by Orthodox Church. (Zigon, 2011). During analysis, I aim to use the lens of concept of Taboo developed by Mary Douglas in her book "Purity and Danger", where she defined Taboo as a social or cultural prohibition/restriction that serves to define the boundaries of society and regulate social behaviour. In the context of this IA, Taboo reinforces social boundaries towards reproducing the knowledge regarding HIV and those infected with it.

Questionnaires are my primary method of data collection because they will help me gather data from a large number of participants and analyze it in a standardized way, as argued in the guidebook Research Methods in Anthropology (Bernard, 2017). Furthermore, the ethnography Cognition in Practice (Lave, 1988), demonstrates power of questionnaires for finding patterns in teaching methods. Similarly, by using questionnaires to gather data from individuals from different educational systems in BiH, I can identify patterns in how these systems shape students' perceptions and knowledge about the HIV virus and those infected with it.

My questionnaire will consist of two parts:

1. Survey aimed to collect data related to stereotypes regarding HIV;
2. Quiz, assessing participants' social and biological knowledge concerning HIV infection;

Two versions of questionnaires, in BCS and English, will be respectfully distributed among national curriculum students and IB students. I will ask 3 peers fluent in both languages to assure the accuracy of my translation.

My initial idea was to complement the questionnaires with observations of classes. However, I realized that the teachers in the local system are likely to modify their presentence due to the fact that they are observed, as argued in the article Teacher Performance and the Hawthorne Effect (Greenwood & Nikkel, 1996).

Therefore, I opted to use open-ended interviews as an alternative secondary method. The compatibility of questionnaires and interviews has been emphasized by John Croswell, in his guidebook Research Design (Creswell, 2014), where he argues that interviews help to reveal nuances and complexities not captured by questionnaires. They will allow participants(students from different educational backgrounds) to share their experiences in greater depth highlighting points they want to emphasize, as argued by Paul Farmer (Farmer, 2004). My interviews will particularly focus on how participants' schools present HIV and its effects on their perceptions.

My primary vision was to also conduct interviews with queer students on the gay dating app Grindr. However, after receiving feedback from my classmates, I realized that ethical issues prevent me from doing so(I wouldn't know whether participants are old enough to give informed consent). Nevertheless, I hope to still gain valuable data without virtual interviews.

My peers also suggested that this research should also include a review of the literature used for teaching about sexual health. While I considered this and even searched for documents I could analyse, I realized it isn't practically doable as BiH has 14 different educational systems, and it would go beyond the scope of this research.

Throughout the process of collecting data, I will assure the transparency of research, by providing descriptions at the online questionnaire and explanations during interviews. This is particularly important in the context of religious identities of participants, as they will potentially discuss topics criticized by mainstream religions.

The anonymity of the respondents will be ensured by not collecting any personal details in the questionnaire. However, despite being conducted at a private space and changing the names of research participants (Fluehr-Lobban, 2017), ensuring complete anonymity of interview participants will be challenging. Since there are few international schools in BIH, hiding participants' schools' names will be difficult. The concept of protecting anonymity in similar circumstances has been explored in the guidebook Anthropological Ethics in Context (Plemmons & Rosenthal, 2011), which emphasises filtering non-essential information as a tool to maintain anonymity of participants.

As ethics in anthropological research are heavily context-based, I am aware that some issues aren't predictable at this point in my research. Therefore, I remain ready to modify my approaches should any ethical principles be confronted throughout my work.

Recently, I suffered from complication of mononucleosis that led my doctors to suspect I had HIV. Though I tested negative in the end, my time in the public health sector exposed me to the stigma surrounding HIV, with nurses refusing to touch me and doctors disgustedly whispering about gays. In contrast, HIV was openly discussed at my IB school, which led me to wonder if IB provides better education on HIV than national curriculum. In this IA, my goal is to investigate whether the suspicion that students at IB schools are more informed about HIV is accurate.

In the context of this IA, AOI of Health, Illness, and Healing will be used to approach the social norms and beliefs related to HIV infection, produced by educational structure in BIH.

Schools play a crucial role in reproducing belief and knowledge because they are primary social institutions responsible for shaping beliefs and attitudes of young people. The "universal truth" can be understood as the curriculum being taught, which is often shaped by convictions of the dominant culture. However, there are also values and beliefs communicated to students through the school environment and socialization process, referred to as hidden curriculum. For example, schools may reinforce gender roles, social hierarchies, and other cultural norms that aren't explicitly taught in the curriculum, but are embedded in the school culture and relations of students with teachers and peers.

This IA will explore the topic of Mary Douglas' Taboo within the reproduction and coexistence of belief systems in schooling system in BiH. Douglas argued that body is seen as a sacred pure entity that must be protected from pollution or contamination, such as sexual diseases. The Taboo surrounding HIV, therefore, serves to identify "unclean" knowledge and to stigmatize it in the social order, particularly at educational institutions.

In this section, anthropological analysis of the fieldwork data in the context of my research question and theoretical framework will be presented. The analysis will be organized into three thematic sub-sections.

In order to know how schools impact individuals perception's, views and knowledge regarding HIV, I firstly had to determine the sources of knowledge the students possess about sexual health. The graph below presents questionnaire results, where students marked source(s) they consider taught them the most about HIV:

Participants from both groups have found internet to be the primary source of information they gained about HIV. While at first, this may seem like an aggravating factor in this research, we can argue that schools have failed in their function as "reproductionists" of knowledge about HIV due to obstacles imposed through Taboo, leading students to seek information through informal sources.

When comparing the two systems, it is evident that students from IB schools are more likely to have school as primary source of HIV education. While this may support the assumption that IB schools dedicate more time in their curriculum towards HIV education, this can be challenged by the argument that IB schools provide broader education in all spheres of life, including HIV.

In this section, I will aim to compare the knowledge that students from both systems have, using both "quiz" questions and reflections participants provided during the interview.

Most striking results of data from the quiz part concerns question asking if HIV medications exist:

The huge difference between number of respondents that believe that medication for HIV doesn't exist mirrors the difference between two systems. We can identify that local system relates to Taboo by flagging HIV and those infected with it as uncurable, "unavoidably condemned to death" as Blanka from the local system stated during her interview. Looking from the perspective of Marry Duaglas, this can be seen as "permanent contamination" of the body.

On the other hand, most of the students from IB school are aware of contemporary medication available for HIV. During the interviews, they also portrayed less-stigmatizing perception of HIV: "It's 21st century, people live normal lives with it", noted John, an international student in BIH. While this may signify absence of Taboo in their education, it maybe reflects a more comprehensive biology curriculum.

The only questions with no significant differences between groups were those related to HIV transmition. One of them included tickboxes representing true/false sexual interactions that result in HIV transmission, where more than 65% of students from both systems ticked (incorrect) options "Kiss" and/or "Oral sex". The second one was ranking various contraceptive methods in their efficiency, and more than 55% of students from both systems ranked Coitus interruptus over HIV medication, which is contemporarily regarded as the most efficient method.

Throughout the interviews with both groups of students, idea of the whole life of infected being determined by the virus was continuously presented. When participants were asked what does Life with HIV mean, most answers were following phrases(or their variations): lifelong sentence, never-ending caution, constant quarantine... Here, it is evident that both belief systems have similar grounds for reproducing the fear-based myth of easy transmission of the virus,even though IB schools clearly teach more about another biological aspect of healing HIV.In the context of Marry Duaglas, this can be understood as system of maintaining cultural coherence of fear towards HIV transmission despite more comprehensive education regarding the process of healing.

Prejudice and stereotypes that students have can be understood as a mirror of beliefs that schooling system reproduces indirectly. They don't reflect the content from the curriculum but rather can be understood in the context of hidden curriculum. As Igor from local system said "The biology book didn't say anything bad about people who have HIV. But the class discussion encouraged by teacher involved constant mentions of drug addicts, f*ggs, and prostitutes". Lana from an IB school described a similar event: "In the biology lesson, we talked about book content in English. However, we later switched to Serbian, where we informally talked about infected people from our town."

This leads to conclusion that schools and their officials might use their position of authority in terms of belief transmission to reproduce the general stereotypes of the virus through social contact between teachers and students, events that take place in the school, and other social channels other than official class literature and content. This is evident in the survey responses, where students from both systems marked/added the terms that associate them with HIV. The most noticeable difference was in colloquial term Narcos[sic] being associated with HIV more often by national system students than by those attending IB. Both terms gays and sex workers "rang a bell" in both groups, with the first one being a common association for IB students and the second one for local curriculum participants.

While both educational systems failed to be the primary source of sexual health information, it can be concluded that students from IB schools found they gained more HIV-related knowledge at school than their peers in the public system. Their knowledge was particularly more advanced regarding the healing of HIV, however, they showed similar understanding of the process of the transmission of the virus as public school students. Finally, both educational structures have used hidden curriculum to reproduce ideas stigmatizing and stereotyping particular groups of people such as sexual workers, drug addicts and gays in IB curiculum.