While Latino teens have the highest birth rates of any youth population in the United States, they are alarmingly underrepresented in the testing of programs touted by the federal government as the best interventions geared to reduce teen pregnancies, according to a new study released today by our organization.
“We’re asking how government officials know these are the best 28 teen pregnancy programs if only 18 percent of the kids who participated in the evaluation of these programs were Latino — the group with the highest teen pregnancy rate,” said Dr. Luis Zayas, the study’s lead researcher and director of the Center for Latino Research at Washington University in St. Louis. “We’re not saying these programs don’t work. We’re just saying we’re not sure they’re the best and most effective for Latino youth.”
While NAHF applauds the overall initiative and the Administration’s efforts to ensure that funding generates the maximum results, the organization’s leaders are concerned that a disproportionately less number of Hispanic-serving organizations will be successful in their application for teen pregnancy prevention funds given the funding stream’s limitations. NAHF calls on the administration to correct oversights of the past and undertake more Hispanic-based research.
To conduct tests that narrow the teen pregnancy program selection to 28 without including a large swath of the population is like “mandating that everyone in the country undergo a particular medical treatment that hasn’t taken into account diet, body type, activity level, and other important factors,” Zayas said. “We’re just saying these 28 youth programs may not be the best empirically tested interventions given that the studies in which they were developed and tested omitted a large portion of the population.”
Click here to see the full report.