Teen pregnancy, individual level variation

Posted on September 20, 2009 by David Hume

Someone else has done the GSS data-digging, and it looks like teen pregnancy is correlated with: 1) higher religious fundamentalism, and, 2) lower religious attendance. To see the full data & analysis you’ll need to pay $10. I want to dig a little deeper at the county-level data, though these findings are consistent with a robust trend of lower SES correlating with stronger & more literalist religious beliefs combined with weaker or more sporadic institutional affiliation.

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3 Responses to Teen pregnancy, individual level variation

  1. Clay Sills says:
    September 24, 2009 at 7:32 am

    I simply wish to place on the record that my vasectomy of May 2008 ends my effect on this data.

  2. Chuck says:
    September 24, 2009 at 9:23 am

    ” . . .correlating with stronger & more literalist religious beliefs combined with weaker or more sporadic institutional affiliation.”

    In other words, it correlates with “dumb but undiciplined”.

  3. Chris says:
    September 24, 2009 at 11:17 am

    I think class is the determining factor here. Lower class people have more teen pregnancies. Most trailer park evangelicals have strong beliefs about the Bible and Jesus, but they hold their beliefs only as folk beliefs or as cultural markers to distinguish them from The Other. The beliefs do not govern their daily existence. If they attend church regularly, shame works as some deterrent to teen pregnancy. If they don’t, their natural prole-ness takes precedence over a vague cultural belief in the literalism of a Bible they never bother to read, and so they start breeding at 15 just like their parents did.

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