The Effectiveness of an Infant Simulator as a Deterrent to Teen Pregnancy Among Middle School Students (open access)

The Effectiveness of an Infant Simulator as a Deterrent to Teen Pregnancy Among Middle School Students

This research was one of the first longitudinal studies to determine the effectiveness of a computerized infant simulator as a deterrent to adolescent pregnancy. All of the female eighth-grade students (221) in 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 from a suburban North Texas middle school were part of this study. They were tracked from the eighth grade through high school graduation to determine whether and when pregnancies occurred. The Kaplan-Meier procedure for survival analysis was used to determine test statistics. Survival functions and hazard functions were created for each independent variable--parenting the infant simulator, ethnic and racial, involvement in co-curricular activities, and crime. Results showed the computerized infant simulator to be highly effective in postponing the on-set of pregnancies for those students who participated in the parenting simulation. Hazards peaked at 3 years, 2 months for the experimental group and at 2 years, 21/2 months for the control group. Summertime and holiday seasons marked times of the year when the majority of pregnancies occurred. Caucasians peaked before the Other ethnic group. No significant differences were detected in regard to involvement in co-curricular activities, and no involvement in crime was self-reported. The model was developed to use as a guideline for implementing a pregnancy …
Date: August 2000
Creator: Hillman, Carol Best
System: The UNT Digital Library