Sexual Intercourse and Pregnancy among African-American Adolescent Girls in High-Poverty Neighborhoods: The Role of Family and Perceived Community Environment*

* The authors are appreciative of the support for this research from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Harrison Steans Foundation. We also thank the Chicago Health Policy Research Council and the Ford Foundation for dissertation fellowships to the first author, and the Ford Foundation for a postdoctoral fellowship to the first author at the Program on Poverty, the Underclass and Social Policy at the University of Michigan. We gratefully acknowledge support from NIMH (MH49694) to the second author. Portions of this paper were presented at “Stress and Coping in Adolescence: A Symposium in Honor of E. Mavis Hetherington,” at the Seventh Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, San Diego, CA., as well as the Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America, New York, NY. We especially thank William Julius Wilson for his guidance and support in the launching of this study, as well as the insights of James Quane. Sandra S. Smith provided helpful comments for this paper. We would also like to thank Rebekah Levine Coley and other project members, especially Laura Pittman and Ann Kuta, for their time and input into this research. Finally, we thank the families who participated in this study for giving us their time and insights.