Profiling Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Risk and Resilience: Understanding the nuance of socio-behavioral risk amongst young people

About this Research Topic

Background

Preventing negative sexual and reproductive health (SRH) outcomes amongst adolescents, such as early and unwanted pregnancies, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections remains a global public health imperative. However, not all adolescents are at equal risk of negative SRH outcomes. Profiles of risk - combinations of individual, biological, relational, familial, social-cultural and structural level factors- serve to make some adolescents more vulnerable than others. More nuanced understandings of what factors serve to enhance risk and promote resilience could help us understand why adolescents in similar settings experience different SRH outcomes. Investigating how these combinations of social and biological determinants of health synergise to influence risk and resilience can drive greater innovation in SRH prevention science.

Preventing negative SRH outcomes is essential to achieving the UN sustainable development goals. An approach that aims to understand profiles of risk – combinations of proximal (personal bias, perceived risk), social (partners, families) and distal socio-structural factors (socio-cultural norms and service access) – recognises that these factors synergise to create unique contexts in which adolescents must manage their risk and make SRH decisions. The context can serve to build the resilience of vulnerable groups, or serve to enhance their risk to negative SRH outcomes. Profiles offer an opportunity to learn why some groups are more vulnerable than others, improving our ability to design more targeted SRH interventions. To do this, multi-disciplinary research, that builds understanding of the intersection of biological risk factors, the social factors that enhance or reduce risk, mediated through public policy will be essential to improving the sexual health of adolescents. This research topic welcomes innovative research that furthers our understanding of profiles of adolescent SRH risk and resilience by exploring the intersections between the biological and socio-behavioural factors that impact the context in which young people navigate their sexual health.

For this Research Topic we encourage transdisciplinary research submissions. Welcomed articles types include original research, reviews, mini review, community case studies, methods papers, brief research reports, and editorials

Thematic areas can include:
1. Innovative understandings of the profiles that characterise adolescent risk or resilience to negative SRH outcomes (for example latent class analysis, factor analysis, SEM [Structural equation modeling], profiles of risk and resilience and developing new tools for measuring risk and resilience)
2. How biological and social determinants of health synergise to impact the risk and resilience of adolescent girls and young women, and adolescent boys and young men.
3. In-depth explorations of the profiles that characterize risk and resilience amongst adolescents, and how this can inform more complex, and context-relevant understandings of SRH risk.
4. Studies that highlight how innovative understandings of risk and resilience have been/can be used to enhance SRH uptake, access or outcomes amongst different profiles of adolescents.
5. The impact COVID-19 has had on profiles of risk and resilience of adolescent girls and young women, adolescent boys, and young men to enhance or to mitigate negative SRH outcomes

Keywords: Socio-behavioral, Adolescents, Innovation, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Risk and Resilience, Intersection

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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