Teenage pregnancy in South Africa: Setting a new research agenda

Abstract

The advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 was coincidentally accompanied by an avalanche of research on the nation-wide risk factors of teenage pregnancy. Today, such research remains, yet the quantitative investigation of factors beyond the individual level has been limited. This study documents the statistical associations found in previous research between teenage pregnancy and key independent variables, namely: age, educational level, socio-economic status and forced sex/gender based violence, as well as a few household and community variables. It goes on to explain the fundamental shortcomings of this approach and proposes an alternative quantitative approach to examining the phenomenon of teenage pregnancy through an adaptation of Bronfenbrenner's ecology theory and Blum et al.'s multilevel and life course framework for early adolescent health and development, and from the perspective of social determinants of health. This will extend the extant knowledge of teenage pregnancy determinants and open up avenues of programme interventions and policy changes to help reduce teenage pregnancy in South Africa.