Teen birth rates have seen a steady, nationwide decline in recent years. However, rates vary across the country along geographic and racial lines. Unplanned pregnancy often leads to decreased educational attainment and decreased lifetime earnings. Efforts to improve education and health — and reduce poverty — require tackling teen birth rates.
Among its peer cities, Louisville currently ranks 9th in the number of births per 1,000 teens between the ages of 15 and 19, with a teen birth rate of 19.4 per 1,000.
Louisville is in the middle tier of its peer group, according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers. Cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are the cities that lag behind their peers on this indicator.
Teen birth rates have decreased steadily over the past decade. For much of that time, Louisville’s rate hovered above that of its peers. In recent years, however, Louisville has recorded a lower teen birth rate than its peers: 20.7 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, compared with 21.7 births among its peers.
Louisville has outperformed its peers over the last decade, decreasing its teen birth rate by about 32 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19. Over the same time period, Oklahoma City has decreased its teen birth rate the most: nearly 40 births per 1,000 women. That’s about 4 times better than St. Louis.
A significant divide exists between the number of births among Black and Hispanic mothers and the number of births among White mothers. In Louisville, for much of the early 2010s, the teen birth rate among Black mothers was substantially higher than that of Hispanic mothers. That trend reversed in the middle of the previous decade. Currently, the teen birth rate in Louisville sits at about 50 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19 for Hispanic mothers and 32 births for Black mothers.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
