| This study incorporates attribution theory as an explanatory framework and as a measurement strategy to investigate the influences of professional discipline and socially learned knowledge structures on researchers' causal perspectives toward the topic of teenage pregnancy. Attributions are what we do when we determine the cause of some event or behavior. Attributions, like social scientific causal perspectives, vary in degree of focus on internal or external causal factors. I identified researchers' attributions from their research articles on teenage pregnancy, and obtained social category background information from a survey. I explored the various possible effects from discipline, sex, age, and religion of the first authors, and characteristics of research articles such as the type of journal, publication date, type of teens studied, and type of outcome variable.; I expected influences from sex, discipline, and type of teens studied. However, in this study, the attributions of female researchers are very much like those of male researchers. The attributions of physicians, psychologists, sociologists, public health specialists, and social workers are also similar. Nurses make more internal attributions, and economists make more external attributions than other researchers. There were significant influences from type of journal, type of teens studied, and type of outcome variable. Researchers who study samples of predominantly white teens make more internally oriented attributions than researchers who study other types of teens. Attributions from health, nursing and medicine journals are more internally oriented than those from economic journals or from the journal Family Planning Perspectives . Attributions from psychology journals are the most internally oriented. Researchers who focus on contraceptive use as the primary outcome variable make more internal attributions than researchers who focus on birth rates, pregnancy rates, or aspects of sexual knowledge and behavior.; Overall, researchers make external or situational rather than internal or dispositional attributions. Researchers also utilize broad multi-level research approaches, or combinations of levels. The findings support a social context attribution framework in which other people influence researchers' attributions, especially the disciplines with which the researchers identify and in whose journals they publish, as well as the teens they study. |
