HIV peer counseling and the development of hope: perspectives from peer counselors and peer counseling recipients.
Peer counseling is becoming an increasingly viable treatment option when working with people living with HIV and AIDS, especially during the diagnostic process. Unfortunately, little research has looked at the perceived benefits of peer counseling from the perspectives of clients receiving the services and those providing the services. In addition, research suggests that hope can help people living with HIV to deal with the HIV diagnosis and to improve their lifestyles; however, the authors were unable to locate any research exploring the benefits of peer counseling in fostering the hope of people living with HIV/AIDS. The present paper, following a community-based research paradigm embedded within a qualitative case study methodology explores the benefits of peer support counseling from the perspective of 12 participants living with HIV who have had experiences with peer counseling. Participants identified several thematic benefits of peer support counseling, including the role of peer counselors in the ...
Traditional collaborative filtering recommendation system put emphasis on data but ignores the users. The recommendation of the similarity analysis emphasizing too much from the data perspective lacks depth analysis of the users without regarding the similarity from the users perspective. In this paper, user character is introduced to improve the user model, and two character-based collaborative filtering recommendations will be proposed: one is to compute user similarity from the user character perspective and select nearest neighbor, and then generates recommendation; another is based on the character-item rating matrix, and then make recommendation to the prospective users. These two ideas can well make up for the inadequacies of the current collaborative filtering recommendation system.