Other Partner, Analysis of Minority Adolescent Male Pregnancy Intentions

Escalating teen pregnancy rates and increasing publicity surrounding youth pregnancies have encouraged innovative ways to approach teen pregnancy prevention. Research on youth pregnancy often lacks a male focus. Therefore this project aims to describe pregnancy intentions of adolescents males' (N=1394) using data from the Mobile Youth Survey (MYS), a community based, multiple cohort longitudinal study of African American adolescents living within 13 of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Mobile, Alabama. Questions from the 2005 MYS data were analyzed to generate correlations, descriptive statistics, and regression analyses. The levels of pregnancy intention were created using questions related to sexual activity, feelings towards pregnancy, and pregnancy attempts within the next year. The percentages of participants that have gotten someone pregnant in the last year and that have children positively increases with intention level. Males feeling more hopeless, engaging in more risky behaviors such as getting drunk, high, or into physical fights were more likely to have high intentions for pregnancy, whereas religiosity and adult expectations had an inverse relationship with level of pregnancy intention. Findings will supplement current research involving male roles in teen pregnancy.