CONTEXT

Females who do well in school are less likely than those who do poorly to experience a nonmarital teenage birth. However, little is known about which dimensions of academic achievement are the most strongly related to teenage childbearing, or about whether the relationship between achievement and childbearing varies according to the presence of other behavioral problems.

METHODS

Individual-level and family-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, combined with information on contextual state-level economic and policy measures, were used to study nonmarital childbearing between the ages of 16 and 19 among 701 females who turned 16 between 2000 and 2007. Multivariate logistic regression analyses examined the relationship between the probability of nonmarital teenage childbearing and age-standardized scores on academic assessments of letter-word identification, passage comprehension and applied problem-solving ability.

RESULTS

Scores on the passage comprehension and applied problem-solving subtests were strongly associated with the probability of experiencing a nonmarital teenage birth among respondents who had relatively few behavioral problems. For this group, an increase of one standard deviation in the score on either assessment was associated with a reduction of about 50% in the risk of experiencing a nonmarital teenage birth. However, no evidence was found of an equivalent relationship among respondents with more pronounced behavioral problems or for the letter-word identification assessment.

CONCLUSIONS

Future research should continue to explore the possibility that improvements in academic achievement may help to reduce the rate of nonmarital teenage childbearing.

Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2015, 47(2):TK, doi:10.1363/47e2115