HIV Testing Decision and Determining Factors in Ghana

Abstract

Knowledge on individual’s HIV/AIDS status provides a tool to reduce or avoid HIV transmission, spread and mortalities due to HIV-related illness. However, most people still do not know their HIV status because they are not willing to test for HIV/AIDS due to various reasons. Hence the aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of various risk factors that are likely to influence decision to ever test for HIV/AIDS. The data used in this paper were obtained from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (n = 1828 observations and 32 risk factors). We applied the Chi-Square test statistic and the logistic regression model to the data in order to study the effects of these risk factors on one’s decision to ever test for HIV. STATA version 14.1 and R version 3.5.2 were used to carry out the statistical analyses. Generally, the results show that education, especially higher education significantly (OR = 0.53, 95% = 0.230, 0.837) increases the likelihood to ever test for HIV. Also, the younger the age groups the higher the effect and significance in the likelihood to ever test for HIV. We found that HIV-TB co-infection (OR = 0.53, 95% = 0.165, 0.893), use of condom anytime one has sex (OR = 0.31, 95% = 0.054, 0.573), wealth index (OR = 0.46, 95% = 0.137, 0.791), awareness of HIV transmission during child-delivery, number of partners significantly affect HIV testing. Those with many partners are less likely (OR = -0.26, 95% = -0.504, -0.007) to ever test for HIV and those who know that healthy person may have HIV are more likely (OR = 0.41, 95% = 0.137, 0.679) to ever test for HIV. Age is the common significant risk factor of ever tested for HIV across the 10 regions in Ghana. Resources should be allocated for more education on these significant risk factors in order to help in the fight against HIV-Health related issues.