ABSTRACT
STUDY OBJECTIVE: Rapid repeat pregnancy accounts for 18% of teen pregnancies and leads to adverse health, economic, and developmental outcomes for teen mothers and their children. Few interventions have been successful in reducing rapid repeat pregnancy. In this qualitative study we examined adolescent mothers' perceptions of their decision-making and behaviors that helped prevent or promote a rapid repeat pregnancy. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, INTERVENTIONS, AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 31 adolescent mothers, aged 16-21 years; 15 of these subjects experienced a repeat pregnancy within a year of their first child's birth and 16 had not. Two researchers used a grounded, inductive technique to identify emergent themes; interviews were subsequently coded accordingly. Counts were tabulated of the number of times themes were endorsed among those with or without a repeat pregnancy. RESULTS: Four overarching themes emerged from the interviews: intentionality regarding pregnancy planning, patients' degree of independence in making contraceptive choices, sense of control over life experience, and barriers to follow-through on contraceptive planning. Teens who had not experienced a rapid repeat pregnancy more often endorsed themes of intentionality in preventing or promoting a pregnancy, independence in decision-making, and feelings of control over their experience. Ambivalence and lack of decision-making about seeking another pregnancy were frequently endorsed by mothers who had experienced a second pregnancy. CONCLUSION: Decision-making regarding seeking or preventing a rapid repeat pregnancy is complex for teen mothers; techniques to help support decision-making or to delay pregnancy until decision-repeat making is complete might be important in reducing rapid pregnancy.
Subject(s)
Gravidity , Mothers/psychology , Pregnancy in Adolescence/psychology , Adolescent , Contraception Behavior/psychology , Decision Making , Female , Grounded Theory , Humans , Life Change Events , Pregnancy , Pregnancy in Adolescence/prevention & control , Qualitative Research , Time Factors , Young AdultABSTRACT
Persistent, irregular fluctuations in spontaneous motor activity are common in the young of many vertebrate species, but whether the irregularity is intrinsic to the dynamics of motor activation or the result of random perturbations is not known. Analysis of the second-by-second variation in the general body movement of awake human infants 1 and 3 months after birth revealed low dimensional structure in the characteristically irregular motor activity and exponential rates of divergence of initially similar states of motor activation. Results support the conclusion that irregularity is an intrinsic property of the dynamics of motor activation involving relatively few effective degrees of freedom and raise questions about the advantages or disadvantages of irregularity built into early behavioral organization.
Subject(s)
Activity Cycles , Infant Behavior/physiology , Motor Activity/physiology , Age Factors , Female , Humans , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Male , Models, Biological , Movement , Systems TheoryABSTRACT
PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the application of mixed dentition analyses in cleft lip and palate patients differed from noncleft patients and to investigate which method provided the most accurate prediction in cleft lip and palate patients. METHODS: Study casts of 30 cleft lip and palate patients and 30 noncleft patients were used in this study. Each patient had dental casts at two stages of dental development. The methods compared included the Moyers, the Tanaka & Johnston (T/J) and the Boston University (BU) prediction methods. RESULTS: Analyses for both groups indicated that the predicted values yielded by each method were significantly different from one another but were all significantly correlated with actual tooth size. Moyers 50% and BU had the smallest mean difference values and no significant difference between the predicted and actual values for both cleft and noncleft control groups. CONCLUSIONS: Types of cleft had no effect on the size of the mandibular permanent canines and premolars. The application of mixed dentition analyses in cleft lip and palate patients does not differ from noncleft patients. Both Moyers 50% and the BU method have high accuracy and correlation in prediction of unerupted teeth in both groups.
Subject(s)
Cleft Lip/pathology , Cleft Palate/pathology , Dentition, Mixed , Tooth/pathology , Age Factors , Analysis of Variance , Bicuspid/pathology , Cleft Lip/classification , Cleft Palate/classification , Cuspid/pathology , Female , Forecasting , Humans , Incisor/pathology , Male , Mandible , Matched-Pair Analysis , Models, Dental , Odontogenesis/physiology , Odontometry , Reproducibility of Results , Statistics as Topic , Tooth Eruption/physiology , Tooth, Deciduous/pathology , Tooth, Unerupted/pathologyABSTRACT
The normal development of adaptive behavior in humans depends on the integration of visual attention and body movement, yet little is known about the initial state of movement-attention coupling at the beginning of postnatal life. We studied 1- and 3-month-old infants during extended periods of visual exploration and found that spontaneous shifts of gaze are preceded by rapid changes in general body movement. The results reveal a tight link between motor activation and overt attention on a time scale of seconds or less. This link undergoes substantial developmental change in the first few weeks after birth. During that time, phasic motor activation may play a key role in visual exploration by helping to unlock gaze when the environment is unchanging.
