The summary is about the research conducted by Ushma D. Upadhyay, Sarah Raifman and Tina Raine-Bennett. The study was the Effects of Relationship Context on Contraceptive Use Among Young Women and was conducted between September 2005 and July 2008 as part of a research on the continuation of hormonal contraceptives for pregnancy prevention. The reason I chose to look at this article is to understand the usage of contraceptives among the women between of 15 and 24 years of age as it is where the research is focused. Unintended pregnancy in the US is an issue that is still high even with the presence of contraceptives, and the study would help uncover why. The unintended pregnancies represent both the mistimed and the unwanted pregnancies. Mistimed pregnancy is where an individual gets pregnant earlier than the time they intended to have children. Unwanted pregnancy, on the other hand, is where a woman with no intentions of having any children currently or in future gets pregnant.

The article highlights the entire research from the objective to the conclusion where the results of the investigation are discussed. The study aimed to bring an understanding of how a woman’s relationship standing affect their use of contraceptives. The research was conducted among the women of the age between 15 and 24 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The research highlights that various studies have been done on the subject where one concluded that long-term relationships were associated with less use of contraceptives or none at all. Another study still highlighted discovered that Latin women in a relationship longer than a year were more likely to use contraceptive triple of those women in a relationship that is less than a year long. The studies, therefore, identified a gap in the research where the effects of relationships on the use of contraceptives by adults were unclear.

The research was conducted among 1316 young women who were avoiding pregnancy for at least one year. The study had follow-ups that were done in the third month into the study, the sixth and the twelfth month. With the data of every follow-up, there was an analysis that examined whether the characteristics of the relationship a woman was in affected their use of contraceptives. The characteristics included the type of the relationship and how long the sexual relationship lasted.

The study found that among women who had partners at the beginning of the study, 78% of them had the same partner at the third month’s follow-up, but the number decreased by the sixth month to 70% and 61% at the twelfth-month follow-up. It was also found that women in less committed relationships were more likely to neglect the use of effective contraceptive methods as compared to those in committed ones. The same was discovered about women in new relationships of between 0 and three months when comparing to them those in relationships older than a year. Demographically, black and Latina women were also less likely to make use of effective contraceptives.

In conclusion, the research found that the type of relationship and its length affected how women use contraceptives. According to the results, women in new and casual relationships were less likely to use effective contraceptives. As a result, the need for family planning providers to discuss the context of a relationship a woman is to help her think of contraceptives as one of their long-term personal strategies.