Teen Pregnancy Awareness

These days, teenagers have so many things to deal with. From SAT's to picking a college, life can seem overwhelming. One of the most important things to them, however, may possibly relationships and sexual ones at that. The purpose of our survey was to find out just how much teenagers really know about teen pregnancy and awareness. The questions we asked we really geared towards gauging their knowledge on the topic to see how much education they had received in the past. Another purpose, I feel, was to find out what changes could be made in sex education to make teenagers more aware about the consequences of certain sexual activity. One of the most important factors in our survey process was obviously our target audience. In order to obtain survey takers, we asked our friends for help and we also went to the dorms to asked people to take the survey. We got around sixty out of eighty people to take the survey that we asked. Mostly, the reason for people to not complete the survey was either because they were to busy or did not feel comfortable answering a survey about sexual intercourse and the like. Most of the people we surveyed were females around the age of seventeen to twenty. We tried to make sure that every person we interviewed was a teenager. The group surveyed was of mixed ethnicity with a larger percentage being Caucasian, followed by Black, Asian, and Indian. Everyone we surveyed had at least some college education, which gave us a good idea of the kind of education they had all received in the past. The focus group was a great experience and also helped the group come to many conclusions about teen pregnancy awareness. We were able to recruit a few students from the dorms for our focus group. This seems like a good way to get a random grouping of students to participate. We also asked a few of our friends to take part in the focus group to make it a more comfortable situation for the whole group by having people who are already comfortable in the setting they are in. We went out recruitment very carefully. We made sure they were female, as we felt we would get better opinions and better discussion about teen pregnancy awareness if we had all one sex and mainly all female. It is important to know a little background information about the participants in our focus group as well. They were all students at the University of Maryland, so they obviously had some previous education at many levels in the educational system. They were all female as well, four of them being Caucasian, Three being Black, and one of Indian background. One of the participants was a friend of mine so I had previous knowledge about her behavior and sexual activity. It was interesting to watch how she reacted with a group of strangers as opposed to a group of friends. I'm sure this can be said for the other members of the focus group as well. We took a good amount of time to figure out where and how to conduct the focus group interview. We were tossed between using some ones apartment or sticking with the basic and using a study group area in McKeldin Library. We decided to go with the latter and use a study room in McKeldin Library. We decided this for a few reasons. One of the biggest reason was because it was a neutral area that everyone could have some comfort in, but not completely different feelings in their surroundings. We got our group in to a circle and began with broad questions and then eventually getting more into the deep questions at the end. The survey took about an hour to an hour and a half to complete, so we got a lot of quality information without dragging it to long and losing our audience to boredom. Some techniques we used were mainly just getting everyone comfortable with each other to start. We realized that teen pregnancy could be a touchy subject with some people, so we wanted to get everyone to know each other better. We started with simple sex question, almost in a joking manner and then eventually got down to business once everyone was comfortable. Question 1. How many of you feel comfortable talking about sex? For those of you who don't feel comfortable tell us why not?
For this question, we got mostly a feeling of comfort when talking about sex. Six of the girls felt very comfortable talking about sex, while one felt somewhat comfortable and one was not very comfortable. I accredited the difference to lifestyle, background, and religion.
Question 2. DO you all understand the different types of relationships discussed in the survey? If not have you ever been informed of those terms An overwhelming number of girls in the group did not understand the different types of relationships. This proves that sex education is not as prevalent in the school systems and at home as it should be. Once we explained to them what the different types were and what they meant they were easily able to explain the types of relationships they participated in, but the problem was that most of them did not know the different types from the start.
Question 3. What above relationship are you in at this time?
Once they understood the different relationships were moved forward. Three of the participants were mainly in homogenous relationships, while five were in serial or other relationships. This shows that many college students are participating in potentially unhealthy relationships.
Question 4. Do you guys use protection? Do you always make your man where protection?
Upon asking this question to the group about 6 out of the 8 girls said that they always make there man where protection where the other two said they sometimes let there boyfriend have intercourse without applying protection. However none of the girls use protection other then a couple of them using birth control pills but other then that the women don't apply condoms or any other protection to their privates.
Question 5. Do you want to / or ready to have kids?
All 8 girls that were part of our focus group said they were not ready to have kids. They stated that they wanted to finish college and get their degree, they wanted to wait till they were older and none of them actually thought they were with the person that was going to be with them for the rest of their life. All of them agreed that at this time they were not ready to have kids because they couldn't support the kid properly and that their parents would have to be the main parents right now and the parents of these girls had jobs and careers as well. Question 6. Do you understand the full out consequences of getting pregnant and what scares you most about getting pregnant?
Most of the group admitted that they were aware of the consequences of getting pregnant but sometimes don't take into consideration the risks when they are having a good time. The group admitted they know the risks but sometimes don't take them as serious as they should because you just don't believe it will ever happen to you that you will get pregnant. The thing that scared the group most about getting pregnant was having to give up their freedom and having to support a child and take care of them 24/7 of every day. In conclusion, I felt that teenagers really didn't know enough about pregnancy that they really should have. For one, they didn't know the different types of relationships. I found this disturbing because this could mean that they are not aware of the problems with having many sex partners, which we found, may be way to common among college students. Most of the interviewees found that protection was important, but I was surprised to see how many didn't use it one-hundred percent of the time or thought pulling out would be effective enough a method of pregnancy prevention. They also seemed to completely forget about transmitting STD's and the effect unprotected sex can have on their bodies. A good thing we found was that none of the girls we questioned said they were ready to have kids. This was a very interesting and stimulating conversation between us and the girls. I thought that some of the participant would have felt they could easily raise a child while attending college full time, but, fortunately, the school system had taught them something about teen pregnancy. As the focus group interview concluding, and in the following days after, I was able to focus on the findings of the communication project. I concluded several things about both the surveys and the focus group interview and found several striking similarities. A major issue I had was with the lack of knowledge teens have on the topic of teen pregnancy. I feel as if teens these days feel that they are on top of the word and nothing can hurt them. Therefore, they go out and participate in sexual activities without being fully prepared or fully aware of the consequences. Teens also don't understand the importance of condoms and other forms of protection in my mind. They loosely joked about pulling out and many of them truly felt that it would be a good enough protector for their body. The fact that they are sexually active with more than one partner is equally disturbing. Teens today don't realize the long term potential of the actions they are taking today. I found that you should always ask your partner if they've been sexually active and if they have any sexually transmitted diseases. If they have been sexually active, you should try and convince them to go and get tested to make sure they aren't carrying anything harmful or dangerous to your body. You should also only have one partner at a time and you should always use the proper protection to prevent anything terrible from happening. If teens would just use their heads a little more and play it safe, we would be able to greatly cut down on accidental pregnancy and also abortion. This heated topic might not be so important if people who got them had more knowledge about sexual relationships, which I hope can be take care of in the schools and at home while the teen is still young enough to make the choice to be safe during sex or to not have sex at all. Now I never told any of the participants to refrain from all sexual activity completely as I don't think that is the real answer to the problem. I feel the real problem lies in education and awareness, both of which can eventually be fixed.