Family Planning for Youth and Emerging Adults: A Discourse Analysis in Social Work Research

Background and Purpose: Family planning, defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau (2000) as the “educational, comprehensive medical or social activities that enable individuals, including minors, to determine freely the number and spacing of their children and to select the means by which this may be achieved," is an integral part of social work. Despite family planning’s relevance to social work research, scholarship in this area is limited. In addition to issues such as a disproportionate focus on heteronormative relationships and lack of methodological rigor, scholars highlight a lack of attention to holistic family planning for youth and emerging adults. The following study employs a discourse analysis of social work scholarship to: 1) understand the relationship of social work research to the construct of “family planning”; and 2) identify gaps in the literature for consideration and innovation.

Method: Discourse analysis is a tool for understanding the use and function of language, going beyond describing language use to explaining its social and political implications. The authors used journal impact factors to identify the top 20 social work journals. Although an imperfect measure, the impact factor helps approximate an objective selection of authoritative social work scholarship. Through a search for the term “family planning,” 258 articles published between 2006-2016 were identified. Exclusion criteria (e.g., articles not published in English, search term only mentioned in citations) reduced the sample to 64 articles. A discourse analysis on the use of the term “family planning,” was conducted, paying particular attention to construction of identities of youth and emerging adults.

Results: Less than half (47%) of articles contained specific language on youth and/or emerging adults. Articles were classified into eight topics (i.e., pregnancy, contraception, abortion, child maltreatment, sexuality/sexual health, fertility/infertility, violence, reflexivity on social work’s role). Most (60%) of the articles mentioning youth and emerging adults focused on pregnancy and contraception. For youth and emerging adults, the analysis suggested three major themes: “family planning” as abortion and contraception; “family planning” for as depoliticized; and the construction of their sexual behavior as “risky.” Family planning as abortion and contraception reflects a limited research agenda that does not attend to the reproductive life course and reproductive justice, which includes both pregnancy prevention and achieving family desires. Only one article mentioned “justice,” reflecting the absence of research engaging the political and economic implications of family planning and a core social work value. No articles engaged developmental stages. Rather, youth and emerging adults were cast as continually making risky decisions with their bodies and personal resources, decisions that must be managed by social workers and healthcare providers.

Conclusion: Though social work research is poised to apply its ethical and theoretical frameworks of justice and equity to family planning with youth and emerging adults, results from this analysis indicate that the extant literature does not do so. Additionally, social work’s attention to developmental stages found elsewhere in its literature are highly relevant and underrepresented in the scholarship on family planning with youth and emerging adults.