Faculty and Staff News

Findings by The Young Women’s Health Study on Teenage Childbearing Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse

Study Overview: Teenaged childbearing has been widely discussed as a powerful risk factor predicting poor developmental and social out-comes for both young mothers and their children. When the study began in 1988 through funding by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the goal was to describe the patterns of substance use among teenage mothers and the outcomes for both the mothers and their children. Later research grants continuing to study the sample expanded the focus to examine sub-stance use from a theoretical perspective, to examine the intragroup heterogeneity in the life trajectories of the mothers and their children, and also to explore their long-term life outcomes. We are one of only a few longitudinal studies of teen moms and their children.

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