Young Women’s Relationships, Contraception and Unintended Pregnancy in the United States

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe new research to investigate relationships, contraception and unintended pregnancies during the transition to adulthood. The Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study began with a 60-minute in-person interview about family background and current relationship characteristics. At the conclusion of the interview, respondents were enrolled in the journal-based portion of the study, which consisted of a 5-minute survey via web or phone and occurred weekly for 2.5 years. We begin by describing the prevalence and significance of unintended pregnancy in the United States and the limitations of past research on unintended pregnancy as background for our study. Then we describe the specific aims of our study and its design strengths. Next we provide a description of the young women in our sample, their relationships and their pregnancy intentions as of the baseline interview, as well as a summary of any changes across the weekly journals. Finally, we provide a summary of study findings that provide new insights into the contexts producing unintended pregnancies among young women. The results presented throughout the chapter are preliminary as data collection only recently ended in January 2012.KeywordsUnintended PregnancyBaseline InterviewPerceive Behavioral ControlPregnancy IntentionContextual AspectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.