The Lasting Effects of Teen Pregnancy Programs: Evidence from a Regional Collaborative

While the effectiveness of individual curricula or educational strategies to combat teenage pregnancy have been explored in numerous rigorous studies, community-wide teen pregnancy prevention efforts that use a diversity of strategies simultaneously remain understudied. We help reduce this gap by examining Delta Futures, a comprehensive regional effort to improve the quality of teen pregnancy programming in 13 counties of the Mississippi Delta, in changing attitudes, motivations, and self-reported intentions relating to abstinence, contraception, and sexual risk. Our analysis of survey assessments from over 3000 participants reveals several findings relevant for practitioners of teen pregnancy programs and collaboratives: (1) Overall, we find evidence that the program improves participants’ willingness to commit to using birth control, but not to pursue abstinence; (2) Abstinence intentions improve considerably for students who had recent sexual experience; (3) Improvement in motivations relating to birth control and abstinence, as well as perceptions of sexual risk; (4) Statistically insignificant but counter-intuitive findings when comparing the effectiveness of an abstinence-only with an abstinence-plus curriculum; (5) More potent impacts among females, the sexually active, and individuals with low self-esteem; (6) Contraception-related impacts are sustained up to 12 months.