Krystale Littlejohn
University of Oregon, OR·Social Science·Early-career
About 43% of pregnancies in the United States are undesired, and most result from not using contraception or using it inconsistently. Why do people who do not want a pregnancy still skip or stop contraception?
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
contraceptive use
contraception
unintended pregnancy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- 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).
- Quantify how both partners' perceptions of pregnancy risk relate to contraceptive use among couples, using longitudinal data that follow the same couples over time.
- Build an interdisciplinary framework that combines demography (the study of fertility and population patterns) with the psychology of risk to explain contraceptive non-use and inconsistent use, laying groundwork for a longitudinal couples study.
More about the research
This project examines two psychological drivers of that choice. Risk perception is how likely a person thinks pregnancy is. Risk tolerance is how much risk they are willing to accept while balancing other goals. The project also gathers data from male partners, who help make contraceptive decisions but are rarely studied.
Why it matters
Undesired pregnancy affects women's well-being, and closing the gap between pregnancy desires and contraceptive use is a public health priority. Better measures of risk perception and tolerance, including data from both partners, could help researchers and family-planning programs understand why couples do not use contraception. This understanding could help people achieve their fertility goals.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Celia Karp
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
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.
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.
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
University of Oregon: 14 labs on PI Pages, $175M a year on research, 219 research doctorates a year.
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