Family structure and sexual and reproductive health outcomes among adolescents in rural Sierra Leone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Orphanhood is common in sub-Saharan Africa, and is a critical issue shaping global assistance for children. Care arrangements for children are often fluid, and many 'orphaned' children have a surviving biological parent. This study examines the protective effects of family-level factors on early sex and pregnancy in rural Sierra Leone. A survey of 530 adolescents in 2 districts in Sierra Leone was analysed to evaluate associations between living arrangement and orphanhood on recent sexual activity and pregnancies out of wedlock. After controlling for confounders, living with one's mother (AOR = 0.46, 95% CI: 0.22-1.00) and living with both parents (AOR = 0.36, 95% CI: 0.17-0.73) were protective against recent sexual activity. Orphan status was not significantly associated with recent sexual activity. Among 164 sexually active adolescents, neither living arrangement nor orphanhood was associated with pregnancy. This study demonstrates the protective effect of living with a surviving biological parent to delay early sexual debut. Once an adolescent becomes sexually active; however, living arrangement is not associated with the risk of pregnancy out of wedlock. The findings suggest that supporting family connectedness and preventing unnecessary family separation may benefit at least some aspects of adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Sierra Leone.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".