Research Reveals Teen Pregnancy Prediction As Early As Eighth Grade

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A University of Arkansas researcher found four factors that seem to predict which eighth grade girls will become teenage mothers. These findings may help educators and parents better focus on ways to prevent teenage pregnancy.

Life experience and a desire to address the problem of teen pregnancy led Tamera Young to her research. Young is the lead author of the study, "Examining External and Internal Poverty as Factors in Teen Pregnancy," which appears in the July-August 2004 issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior. She conducted her research as a graduate student at UA, before getting her master's degree in 1998.

Young was assisted in the research by her colleagues, Jean Turner, associate professor of human and environmental sciences; George Denny, associate professor of education; and her husband, Michael Young, University Professor of health science.

The group analyzed data from the National Education Longitudinal Study. The study consisted of data collected from interviews conducted with 25,000 eighth graders from across the nation, who were then re-interviewed as 10th and 12th graders.

"I was a teen mother," Young said. "As I reviewed this national data set, I selected factors that I attributed to my own desire to have a baby in my teens."

Young and her team divided the eighth grade girls into two groups: those who at the 10th or 12th grade interview indicated they were pregnant, had a child of their own or had dropped out of school due to a pregnancy, and those who did not report a pregnancy. In the sample, 937 girls reported having had a child or having been pregnant by 10^th or 12^th grade.

The researchers identified 14 different variables that reflected what Young terms either internal or external poverty. External poverty describes a situation deficient in financial resources and "efficacy builders." Efficacy builders include family environments that nurture, educate, empower and teach self-regulation.

Internal poverty describes a person's lack of internal resources, such as attitudes and beliefs that attribute outcomes to individual effort, high future expectations and few perceived limitations for life options.

The four variables that contributed most to teen pregnancy were parents' highest level of education, teens' educational expectations of themselves, locus of control and confidence in graduating from high school.

"These are some of the very factors that I have addressed in the prevention programs that I have written," Young said. Young wrote components of the successful "Sex Can Wait" curriculum series and "Abstinence: Pick & Choose Activities," developed by UA researchers.

The eighth grade girls who later became pregnant were likely to experience external poverty, such as parents with lower occupational, educational or economic status. They often perceived their parents as having lower educational expectations of them, and reported that they did not know the reasons their parents told them to do the things they told them to do. According to Young, this hints at authoritarian parenting.

The girls who became pregnant also showed evidence of internal poverty, with low confidence of high school graduation and low educational expectations. They tended to report feeling limited to working in traditional occupations.

The future teen mothers also showed an external locus of control, meaning the girls believed that their lives are controlled by fate, luck or powerful people, as opposed to their own personal behaviors.

"Perhaps this lack of empowerment and tendency to fail to see personal behaviors as instrumental to life outcomes explains the only variable for which the study did not find a statistical difference - expected occupational status," Young said.

This was particularly interesting because there were significant differences on the variables "confidence in graduating from high school" and "educational expectations." There were clear differences in the girls' understanding of what a high status occupation might require relative to educational preparation.

"It's like, 'Oh, you mean I might actually have to go to school to be a doctor?'" Young explained.

She pointed out that this suggests a need for early career education that emphasizes opportunities, education necessary for those opportunities and the resources available to achieve that education.

Young hopes that her findings will help interventions, policy and programs to better address the problem of teen pregnancy. From her research, she found that teen pregnancy prevention programs must begin before the eighth grade and must help parents instill a sense of self-empowerment in girls. An effective program must also promote academic achievement by enriching children's perceptions of personal life options for which an education is needed, empowering children and their families and preventing internal poverty.