Table 2.

Symbolic contexts associated with HIV and STI prevention and testing engagement with urban refugee adolescents and youth in Kampala, Uganda

Theme	Sub‐theme	Illustrative quotation
Religion & religious institution involvement	Potential for HIV and STI testing and prevention outreach	‘It will also be good to involve churches because there you find people of different ages’. (FG, young women, aged 16–19, ID #6) ‘Also [outreaches] at churches and NGOs that work with refugees, radio talk shows’. (FG, young women, aged 16–19, ID #2) ‘I think the best way is how we have been doing outreaches, most cases are the churches, from there you can get them because there are many churches for refugees, for Congolese, Banyarwanda’. (FG, young women, aged 20–24, ID #3) ‘Everyone here has a church they go to; in the area where we stay there are different churches for refugees, if you approach most of them it becomes easy…you give information to me and I go to my church and everyone goes to their church, that is how you will get people’. (FG, young women, aged 20–24, ID #9)
	Conflicting beliefs	‘It might be tricky, it might work out. The tricky part might be when you look at the scenarios like when you go to do HIV testing in churches… So they need sensitization, we need to organize like workshops for religious leaders specifically and local leaders so that they can understand and you can take the program to them’. (KI, humanitarian agency)
Medical mistrust	Mistrust of people coming in the community to offer HIV testing	‘It’s something he heard in the community but never experienced it. That these people who come in the tents, sometimes they inject you with HIV also. So, people cannot trust them because they fear maybe they are also giving the same sickness since we don’t trust the needles they’re using and stuff like that’. (FG, young men, aged 20–24, ID #7)
	Mistrust of the HIV self‐test kit	‘You know they are used to blood tests and know that HIV is in the blood, not just in the mouth. They will think that it’s just a lie’. (FG, young men, aged 20–24, ID #3) ‘If I want to go and test myself but then I take milk, can it still show that I have HIV in case I have it? Because some people say that if you go with maybe a boyfriend for an HIV test and you take milk or Coca Cola that they affect the results and cannot show that you are HIV positive’. (FG, refugee sex workers, ID #6)
Inequitable gender norms		Do you think if a woman fears the husband like that, what about the child who is seventeen years…. So for them from eighteen and even seventeen they can be married off. Because of cultural beliefs and egos among these refugee men, mainly it was brought about by their cultures for women to respect their husbands and fear them. (KI, humanitarian agency)