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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Matthew Berger, MA, Research Department, Family Planning Council, 260 South Broad Street, Suite 1000, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-985-2656, matthew@familyplanning.org, Paul G Whittaker, PhD, Family Planning Council of Pennsylvania, 260 S. Broad St., Suite 1000, Philadelphia, PA 19102, and Kay Armstrong, MS, Consultant, Drexel Hill, Philadelphia, PA 19102-5076.
Demonstrating that participation in youth development activities decreases teen sexual risk behavior can be an important tool for community organizing around reducing teen pregnancy. The Philadelphia Coalitions for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Project (PCAPPP) is a CDC-funded 7-year project to reduce teen pregnancy through the establishment of neighborhood coalitions promoting youth development activities. Data were collected between 1998 and 2002 from three cross-sectional community surveys of 750-800 teens living in Philadelphia zip codes with high teenage pregnancy rates. Regression analyses of these data revealed that participation in any of 14 youth development activities (e.g., music, art or dance lessons) reduced one or more sexual risk behaviors, including ever having children, ever being pregnant or impregnating someone, and using no contraception during last vaginal sex. These analyses also demonstrated that each of these sexual risk behaviors and youth development activities significantly covaries with each other as well as with other sexual behaviors (e.g., oral sex), non-sexual risk behaviors (e.g., marijuana use) and attitudinal and demographic variables (e.g., life goals, religiosity, age). SEM represents a powerful analytic tool for capturing the complexity of these relationships, as it controls for simultaneous covariance. Analyzing these survey data with SEM delineates the precise relationship between sexual behaviors, risk behaviors, youth development activities and other attitudinal and demographic variables. The advantages and disadvantages of using SEM to analyze the association between youth development activity participation and teen pregnancy prevention and how community agencies can use this information to improve services for youth will be discussed.
Learning Objectives: Participants at this session will be able to
Keywords: Teen Pregnancy Prevention,
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.