Identification of Risk Factors for Teenage Pregnancy and Infant Mortality using Partial Least Squares

Teenage pregnancy and infant mortality are two important public health issues in the United States. In 1999, the infant mortality rate for women under 20 years of age was 10.3 per 1,000 live births compared to 7.0 per 1,000 live births among all ages. The purpose of this study is to investigate risk factors that affect teenage pregnancy and infant mortality simultaneously. The data for this study was obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism between the years 1959 and 2009. The risk factors are state poverty rate, state per capita income, cigarette consumption, alcohol consumption, state unemployment rate, and the percent of the state population with less than nine years education. Data was entered into STATA and analyzed using the partial least squares (PLS) regression model. PLS is more effective than any other regression model at obtaining discriminate information from the data source and has the ability to handle more observations than risk factors. The study results show that the most important risk factor for infant mortality was the percentage of the state population with less than nine years education. The most important risk factors for teenage pregnancy were state poverty rate, state per capita income, cigarette consumption, and alcohol consumption. The findings of the study suggest that intervention programs should be tailored towards populations in this demographic in order to reduce infant mortality and teenage pregnancy rates.