Predicting pregnancy among urban, ethnically diverse adolescent females

Background/Significance: Indentifying risk factors for becoming pregnant in adolescent females is a major public health initiative. However, the extant literature has not examined the role of some pertinent health risk behaviors in predicting teenage pregnancy (i.e., intimate partner violence, non-suicidal self-harm). Objective/Purpose: This study examined whether these health risk behaviors predict pregnancy in order to help inform prevention programs. Methods: Participants include 1,328 ethnically diverse public high school students (51.5% female) that completed the 2009 Philadelphia Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). Data collected from survey participants were weighted to represent the 43,867 public high school students in Philadelphia. To investigate which health risk behaviors may predict pregnancy in adolescent females, a forward stepwise logistic regression was used to determine if intimate partner violence or non-suicidal self-harm predicted pregnancy. Results: Overall, 13.6% of adolescent females reported ever being pregnant, 20.7% reported non-suicidal self-harm during the past year, and 18.4% reported intimate partner violence during the past year. Regression results indicate that the overall model correctly classified 86.2% of adolescent females. Intimate partner violence (Exp(B)=2.19) and non-suicidal self-harm (Exp(B)=1.20) were predictive of having been pregnant. Discussion/Conclusions: Among these ethnically diverse urban high school females, intimate partner violence and non-suicidal self-harm were significantly related to, and increased the risk of, pregnancy. The results of this study can help inform pregnancy prevention programs for adolescent females by identifying pertinent health risk behaviors that may precede pregnancy.