Adolescent decision making: a broadly based theory and its application to the prevention of early pregnancy

The purpose of this paper is to present a broadly based theory of adolescent decision making including all the necessary components of the subject: cognitive development, social and psychological factors, and, perhaps most importantly, cultural and societal influences. Previous theories and applications have often focused on only one or two aspects. This theory is then applied to the problem of prevention of early pregnancy at an inner-city high school. Use of this theory, combined with an open-ended data-gathering format made possible some of the unexpected findings of this study: most of the young women at this school desire their pregnancies; many of them prefer single parenthood to traditional family structure; and low academic skills and poverty often result in pregnancy, rather than pregnancy causing high school dropouts and a life of poverty. Prevention programs will necessarily differ for sexually active adolescents who do and do not want pregnancy and for younger versus older adolescents. In designing such programs, we need to focus on pregnancy as the problem rather than on adolescent sexuality.