Page 115 - IJPS-1-1

International Journal of Population Studies

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Using panel data to examine pregnancy

attitudes over time

1*
2
Heini Väisänen and Rachel K. Jones
1 Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton
Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
th
2 Research Division, The Guttmacher Institute, 125 Maiden Lane 7 floor, New York, N.Y.
10038, USA

Abstract: There is a lack of research examining changes in women’s fertility attitudes over
relatively short periods of time. The aim of this study was to determine whether and how
women’s attempts to get pregnant and their desire to avoid pregnancy changed over six months’
time as well as which characteristics and circumstances were associated with these changes.
Using multinomial regression, we analyzed two panels of data from a sample of approximately
3,000 U.S. adult women gathered within six months apart. Only 4% of the women were trying
to get pregnant at both time points, but six percent went from trying to not or vice versa.
Two-thirds reported a strong desire to avoid pregnancy at both points, but 9% transitioned from
strong to not strong and an additional 7% transitioned from not strong to strong. Women who
transitioned to a more serious romantic relationship were at increased risk of transitioning to
trying to become pregnant and, not surprisingly, to a weaker pregnancy avoidance. Some of the
variables we tested, including changes in employment status and race/ethnicity, were asso-
ciated with one outcome but not the other. The results highlight the importance of taking a ho-
listic perspective of women’s lives when studying pregnancy intentions and in reproductive
health care services such as contraceptive counseling. Context matters and it may change ra-
pidly.
Keywords: fertility intentions, pregnancy avoidance, pregnancy planning, panel data

*Correspondence to: Heini Väisänen, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; Email: h.e.vaisanen@lse.ac.uk
Received: August 18, 2015; Accepted: October 5, 2015; Published Online: October 12, 2015
Citation: Väisänen H and Jones R K. (2015). Using panel data to examine pregnancy attitudes over time.
International Journal of Population Studies, vol.1(1): 109–121.
http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJPS.2015.01.007.
1. Introduction
Copyright: © 2015 Heini Väisänen and
Rachel K. Jones. This is an Open About half of the pregnancies in the United States are unintended (Finer and Zolna, 2014).
Access article distributed under the This figure has remained relatively stable for two decades and has inspired researchers to
terms of the Creative Commons Attribu-
tion-NonCommercial 4.0 International study topics such as the determinants of fertility intentions (McQuilan, Greil, Shreffler et al.,
License (http: //creative-commons.org/ 2015; Reed and Mcbroom, 1995; Gatny, Kusunoki, and Barber, 2014), which groups of
licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non- women are more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy (Finer and Zolna, 2014;
commercial use, distribution, and rep- Finer and Henshaw, 2006), to what extent individuals fulfill their desired family size (Ber-
roduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited. rington and Pattaro, 2014; Hartnett, 2014; Morgan and Rackin, 2010; Miller, Rodgers, and

International Journal of Population Studies | 2015, Volume 1, Issue 1 109