Protocol for an Observational Study on the Effects of Giving Births from Unintended Pregnancies on Later Life Physical and Mental Health

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed protocol for an observational study examining the long-term physical and mental health effects of giving birth from unintended pregnancies, utilizing innovative cross-screening methods to enhance causal inference.

Contribution

It introduces a novel flexible cross-screening approach with two investigator teams to improve causal analysis and replicability in studying unintended pregnancy effects.

Findings

Designs a study to assess long-term health impacts of unintended pregnancies.

Proposes a novel two-team cross-screening methodology for causal inference.

Plans to identify outcomes affected by unintended pregnancies across subgroups.

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in studying the effect of giving births to unintended pregnancies on later life physical and mental health. In this article, we provide the protocol for our planned observational study on the long-term mental and physical health consequences for mothers who bear children resulting from unintended pregnancies. We aim to use the data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and examine the effect of births from unintended pregnancies on a broad range of outcomes, including mental depression, psychological well-being, physical health, alcohol usage, and economic well-being. To strengthen our causal findings, we plan to address our research questions on two subgroups, Catholics and non-Catholics, and discover the "replicable" outcomes for which the effect of unintended pregnancy is negative (or, positive) in both subgroups. Following the idea of non-random cross-screening, the data will be split according to whether the woman is Catholic or not, and then one part of the data will be used to select the hypotheses and design the corresponding tests for the second part of the data. In past use of cross-screening (automatic cross-screening) there was only one team of investigators that dealt with both parts of the data so that the investigators would need to decide on an analysis plan before looking at the data. In this protocol, we describe plans to carry out a novel flexible cross-screening in which there will be two teams of investigators with access only to one part of data and each team will use their part of the data to decide how to plan the analysis for the second team's data. In addition to the above replicability analysis, we also discuss the plan to test the global null hypothesis that is intended to identify the outcomes which are affected by unintended pregnancy for at least one of the two subgroups of Catholics and non-Catholics.