How and What Do Women Learn About Contraception? A Latent Class Analysis of Adolescents and Adult Women in Delaware

Across the reproductive life course, women receive information about contraception that may influence their contraceptive behaviors. This study examines the information sources that adolescents and older women combine to acquire information about contraception.

A state-representative survey of women aged 18-44 residing in Delaware, US, in 2017 asked from what sources respondents recently learned about contraception and the type of information obtained. The 2017 Delaware Youth Risk Behavior Survey, representative of public high school students aged 14-18, included analogous questions. Latent class analysis was applied to classify respondents in both samples of adolescents (n = 1253) and adult women (n = 1008) according to the information sources they combined. We estimated multinomial logistic regressions to assess the demographic and reproductive history predictors of using each of the information source repertoires and binomial logistic regressions to analyze their relationship to the information acquired.

Adolescents are more likely than adults to report having recently acquired any information about contraception (76% vs. 64%), but they are more likely to rely primarily on a single source. In contrast, adult women are more likely to combine multiple sources. Age, education, and sexual activity emerged as important predictors of information source repertoires. Adults who combine information sources and adolescents who learn mainly from health care providers or school personnel report the greatest breadth in the contraception-related information acquired.

Interventions to provide or improve contraceptive knowledge may be more effective if they account for how women use and combine information sources, particularly at different stages of their reproductive lives.