Role of social support in teen pregnancy

Abstract

Adolescent pregnancy is an important problem of concern in today’s society, which mainly affects the young population between the ages of 15 to 19 years. Their study has been approached from different perspectives, both at the level of health, education, social, psychological and economic area; especially because of the high fertility rates that it has presented in Latin America and the Caribbean. The aim of the present work is to describe the levels of social support in a group of 25 pregnant adolescents that make up the study sample, temporarily orienting the items to the period prior to their gestation. For this, the MOS social support questionnaire was used, which evaluates this category with the emotional, instrumental, affective and leisure activities subscales; which has been validated through different studies. The results demonstrate the impact of teenage pregnancy on student desertion, and the level of emotional support minimal that an important group of the sample had. It is concluded that adolescent pregnancy generates desertion from the educational system and that the lack of emotional support during adolescence puts adolescents at risk in situations of stress.