THE LINK BETWEEN BLACK TEEN PREGNANCY AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING IN DETROIT - A NEIGHBORHOOD SCALE ANALYSIS

Detroit’s economy, based largely on automobile production, experienced a major downturn during the decade of the 1970s. With the collapse of jobs in this economic sector, the city’s black community began to manifest the full range of behaviors said by Wilson to be associated with the underclass. In this paper attention is focused on a single behavior-teen pregnancy. A sample of neighborhoods were selected as a means of testing Wilson’s thesis that a set of social dislocation variables were associated with increasing levels of intensity in teen fertility. Weak support for at least one variable was found in each time period. We concluded, however, that high levels of teen fertility was not confined to neighborhoods identified as underclass, thereby casting doubt on the use of the underclass label to describe selected neighborhoods. © 1991 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.