文章基本信息

标题：Building an Evidence Base to Inform Interventions for Pregnant and Parenting Adolescents: A Call for Rigorous Evaluation
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作者：Christina R. Lachance ; Barri B. Burrus ; Alicia Richmond Scott 等
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2012
卷号：102
期号：10
页码：1826-1832
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2012.300871
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Adolescent parents and their children are at increased risk for adverse short- and long-term health and social outcomes. Effective interventions are needed to support these young families. We studied the evidence base and found a dearth of rigorously evaluated programs. Strategies from successful interventions are needed to inform both intervention design and policies affecting these adolescents. The lack of rigorous evaluations may be attributable to inadequate emphasis on and sufficient funding for evaluation, as well as to challenges encountered by program evaluators working with this population. More rigorous program evaluations are urgently needed to provide scientifically sound guidance for programming and policy decisions. Evaluation lessons learned have implications for other vulnerable populations. THE UNITED STATES HAS THE highest adolescent birth rate in the industrialized world. 1–5 Pregnancies and resulting births to adolescent mothers create serious public health challenges with both short- and longer-term health and social consequences. Although recent data suggest that birth rates for US adolescents aged 15 to 19 years have declined for the past 3 years, hitting a record low of 34.3 births per 1000 adolescents in 2010, 6 focused efforts are still needed to provide pregnant and parenting adolescents with appropriate, high-quality services that seek to minimize adverse outcomes for adolescents and their children. Unfortunately, empirical evidence to inform interventions for pregnant and parenting adolescents is limited because relatively few rigorous program evaluations and replications have been conducted. The current socioeconomic environment, marked by increasingly limited budgets for social and public health programs, underscores the need for empirical evidence to inform programmatic decision-making and for increased efficiency in evaluations that are conducted. We have provided (1) a brief overview of the consequences of adolescent pregnancy and parenting, (2) an examination of rigorous evaluations of programs for adolescent parents in the recent literature, and (3) recommendations for conducting more rigorous evaluations to address the urgent need for scientifically sound information to guide programming and policy decisions.