Celia Karp
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Whether and when someone wants to become pregnant is one of the most useful things to know when designing reproductive health services. But the usual survey questions capture it poorly, especially in places with limited resources and high birth rates, and they largely ignore men's perspectives even though male partners strongly influence these decisions.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
pregnancy preferences
Desire to Avoid Pregnancy scale
DAP scale
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Develop gender-specific versions of the Desire to Avoid Pregnancy (DAP) scale with construct validity in Uganda, translating items into local languages for use with women and men.
- Use cognitive and in-depth interviews with 30 women aged 15-49 and 30 men aged 18+ to assess item comprehension and whether each DAP domain is salient, analyzing convergence and divergence by gender through deductive thematic analysis.
- Pilot test the adapted DAP scales with 400 women and 400 men purposively sampled from one rural and one urban Ugandan district, including face validity assessment.
- Evaluate the psychometric properties of the Ugandan DAP scales separately for women and men, including dimensionality, internal consistency reliability and structural validity, using Item Response Theory methods.
More about the research
In Uganda, many women's stated fertility intentions do not match the contraception they use. This project works on the measurement problem itself: adapting and testing a questionnaire that captures pregnancy preferences as something multidimensional rather than a simple yes-or-no intention, separately for women and for men.
Why it matters
Efforts to prevent unintended pregnancy in high-fertility, low-resource settings are limited by crude measures of what people actually want. Validated, gender-specific pregnancy preference scales could let health programs in Uganda and similar settings find individuals with strong desires to avoid pregnancy, tailor person-centered contraceptive counseling to women and men, better understand couples' decisions, and support reproductive autonomy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Corinne Rocca
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify the changing and stable life factors, such as relationships and financial stability, that shape preconception pregnancy preferences, and test how Desire to Avoid Pregnancy (DAP) scores predict new pregnancies in a cohort of 2,200 women.
Krystale Littlejohn
University of Oregon, OR·Social Science·Early-career
Identify how risk tolerance relates to contraceptive use among men and women who do not want a pregnancy, using validated health-psychology risk measures adapted and pretested through cognitive interviewing (asking respondents how they interpret questions).
Jayme Congdon
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Qualitatively assess, through interviews with about 50 postpartum women and healthcare team members, what they prefer in pediatric clinic-based postpartum contraceptive services.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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