Young Adults’ Attitudes to Contraception Mediate their Likelihood of Use
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas 91% of unwed mothers are under 21 years, researchers and health policy advisers hope to unpack the association between a woman’s wish to avoid becoming pregnant and the intention to use birth control, a relation we hypothesized to be mediated by various attitudes to contraceptive use (including cost, ease of use, extra planning, even morality). In total, 22 potential mediators were evaluated using the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study – consisting of 1003 Michigan women aged 18-20 years from Caucasian, African, and Hispanic American backgrounds. Results showed a significant relation between avoiding pregnancy and contraceptive use; when divided by ethnic background, the negative association was higher for African Americans compared to Caucasians, and higher still for Hispanics. This relation was mediated by each of: premarital sex is OK if attracted; faster recovery following pregnancy if young; birth control involves too much planning; it’s a hassle to use birth control; and marital relations improve with the advent of children. When divided by ethnicity, we unexpectedly uncovered several suppressor variables, following whose extraction improved the original association. Implications for researchers and health professionals, as well as directions for future research, are outlined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".