Pregnancy risk-taking among young unmarried women: An analysis of its determinants and prevention

Abstract

This paper deals with several hypotheses about pregnancy risk-taking behavior among young unmarried women in the United States. The first section reviewed seven hypotheses that were derived from an extensive search of the literature and that emphasized different causes for pregnancy risk-taking. According to these hypotheses, pregnancy risk-taking behavior is a function of the following conditions: 1) lack of contraceptive knowledge and skills, 2) lack of contraceptive accessibility, 3) intrapsychic conflicts between conscious and unconscious or subconscious motives, 4) social support from others, 5) normative controls, 6) transient situational factors, and 7) factors influencing the consistency between contraceptive attitude and behavior. The second section consisted of the salient findings of an exploratory study we conducted; it reviewed these findings in the context of the seven hypotheses presented earlier. The study was based upon intensive interviews of a small sample of unmarried women residents of dormitories in a major university campus. The study suggests that pregnancy risk-taking behavior is associated with several intrapersonal (psychological), interpersonal, and situational factors. Although absence of contraceptive knowledge and access lead to nonuse of contraceptives, the reverse is not necessarily true. The third section contained a formulation of a multivariate hypothesis about pregnancy risk-taking and presented some of the implications of the findings of the exploratory study for preventive interventions. According to our multivariate hypothesis, if the exogenous variables (age, fecundity, and social status) are comparable, pregnancy risk-taking behavior is a function of independent and additive effects of four sets of factors. These are 1) personal contraceptive intentions, 2) social support, 3) situational factors, and 4) accessibility of contrceptives. It is argued that the relative weights of these four factors vary from one population to another and that these weights can only be ascertained empirically.