Abstract
Background:Many adolescent mothers are parenting young children under highly stressful conditions as they are managing first-time parenthood, poverty, lack of housing, school and work, and challenging peer and familial relationships. Mobile health (mHealth) technology has the potential to intervene at various points in the emotion regulation process of adolescent mothers to provide them support for more adaptive emotional and behavioral regulation in the course of their daily life.Objective:The goal of this study was to examine the acceptability, feasibility, use patterns, and mechanisms by which a mobile technology used as an adjunct to in-person, provider-delivered sessions fostered adolescent mothers’ adaptive emotion regulation strategies under real-life conditions.Methods:Participants (N=49) were enrolled in the intervention condition of a larger pilot study of homeless adolescent mothers living in group-based shelters. The mHealth technology. Calm Mom, consisted of a mobile app and a wrist-worn sensorband for the ambulatory measurement and alerting of increased electrodermal activity (EDA), a physiological measurement of stress. We examined logs of mobile app activity and conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with a subsample (N=10) of participants. Qualitative data analysis was guided by the theoretical frames of the intervention and a technology acceptance model and included an analysis of emerging themes and concepts.Results:Overall, participants indicated that one or more of the elements of Calm Mom supported their ability to effectively regulate their emotions in the course of their daily life in ways that were consonant with the intervention’s theoretical model. For many adolescent mothers, the app became an integral tool for managing stress. Due to technical challenges, fewer participants received sensorband alerts; however, those who received alerts reported high levels of acceptability as the technology helped them to identify their emotions and supported them in engaging in more adaptive behaviors during real-life stressful situations with their children, peers, and family members.Conclusions:Calm Mom is a promising technology for providing theoretically driven behavioral intervention strategies during real-life stressful moments among a highly vulnerable population. Future research efforts will involve addressing technology challenges and refining tailoring algorithms for implementation in larger-scale studies.
Highlights
This report contains comprehensive statistics on the incidence of pregnancy, birth and abortion among women aged 24 or younger for the United States as a whole and for individual states in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available
Pregnancy rates among non-Hispanic women of races other than white and black were highest in South Dakota (103 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15–19), followed by Alaska (70), New Mexico (70), Oklahoma (58) and Minnesota (49); the lowest rates were found in Vermont (13), Tennessee (17), West Virginia (17), Georgia (18) and Virginia (19)
This report provides updated surveillance statistics for all pregnancies to young women in the United States. This statistical portrait of the fertility experiences of women in the earliest reproductive ages improves our knowledge of characteristics of the U.S population and trends in pregnancy, birth and abortion statistics illustrate how young women’s reproductive experiences have been changing over time, whether their pregnancies were intended or not
Summary
This report contains comprehensive statistics on the incidence of pregnancy, birth and abortion among women aged 24 or younger for the United States as a whole and for individual states in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available. A new feature in this report is the calculation of state-level unintended pregnancy rates among women younger than 20 in each state for which data were available (31 states). We present key findings from the national and state tables in this report We discuss these findings using graphics that highlight trends over time and geographical variation. A full discussion of the methods and data sources used for this report follows the tables
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