Regionalization of the socioeconomic determinants of adolescent fertility in Tamaulipas, 2015

Adolescent pregnancy is a social and public health problem that has been usually addressed by promoting sexual and reproductive education among teenagers and youngsters. However, these interventions tend to ignore gender inequities, inequality gaps, poverty, marginalization, social deprivation and lack of respect for human rights, although changing these circumstances could favor the prevention of this phenomenon more directly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between adolescent fertility and the conditions of the social and economic structure in the state of Tamaulipas through a regionalization with the REDCAP (meaning, Regionalization with Dynamically Constrained Agglomerative Clustering and Partitioning) algorithms procedure done at the municipal level, to identify the risk of adolescent pregnancy. The findings revealed significant differences in vulnerability levels by region based on socioeconomic and fertility variables. This undoubtedly shows the need to address the phenomenon of adolescent pregnancy with differentiated approaches as well.