Consistent Reports of Pregnancy/Birth Contexts and Links to Parental Experiences

The link between pregnancy/birth contexts and subsequent maternal, family, and child well-being is the subject of extensive research. Much of this work uses retrospectively reported survey data on birth contexts, particularly for birth intendedness and relationship status at birth, but rarely has research considered whether or how people might report birth contexts differently over time. In this paper, we used Waves III, IV, and V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the only nationally representative longitudinal dataset with repeated measures of pregnancy/birth contexts for the same live birth. Focusing on first births, we (a) examined if, and to what extent, individuals changed their retrospective reports of pregnancy wantedness and relationship status at birth, (b) identified if there are sociodemographic correlates of inconsistent reports, and (c) explored whether inconsistent reports are associated with parental experiences. Results showed that consistency ranges from 49 to 65% when comparing first birth wantedness and relationship status reports across all three waves among births first reported in Wave III ( $$n$$ = 1083) and rises to 73–80% across the latter two waves when comparing births first reported in Wave IV ( $$n$$ = 3766). We found weak evidence of social patterning of inconsistency, with only age emerging as a predictor for both indicators across the analytical samples, and we did not find evidence that inconsistency biased the association between birth context and parental experiences.