Exploration, Confirmation, and Replication in the Same Observational Study: A Two Team Cross-Screening Approach to Studying the Effect of Unwanted Pregnancy on Mothers' Later Life Outcomes

2025-05-20

AI Summary

This study investigates the long-term effects of unintended pregnancy on maternal mental health, physical health, economic status, and life satisfaction in mid-to-late life. Leveraging data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we introduce a novel “dual-team cross-screening” framework: it integrates covariate-driven data partitioning, dual-blind preregistered analysis plan review, exploratory modeling, and confirmatory preregistered causal analysis—all within a single dataset—to simultaneously generate hypotheses, conduct causal inference, and replicate findings. This approach balances rigorous multiple-testing control with robust discovery. Empirically, unintended pregnancy significantly predicts increased depressive symptoms, reduced household income, and lower life satisfaction in mid-to-late life. Beyond documenting the multidimensional long-term costs of unintended childbearing, this work advances methodology for enhancing causal inference credibility in settings with limited sample sizes.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality
• Machine Learning: Causal Learning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

The long term consequences of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on mothers have not been much explored. We use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and propose a novel approach, namely two team cross-screening, to study the possible effects of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on various aspects of mothers' later-life mental health, physical health, economic well-being and life satisfaction. Our method, unlike existing approaches to observational studies, enables the investigators to perform exploratory data analysis, confirmatory data analysis and replication in the same study. This is a valuable property when there is only a single data set available with unique strengths to perform exploratory, confirmatory and replication analysis. In two team cross-screening, the investigators split themselves into two teams and the data is split as well according to a meaningful covariate. Each team then performs exploratory data analysis on its part of the data to design an analysis plan for the other part of the data. The complete freedom of the teams in designing the analysis has the potential to generate new unanticipated hypotheses in addition to a prefixed set of hypotheses. Moreover, only the hypotheses that looked promising in the data each team explored are forwarded for analysis (thus alleviating the multiple testing problem). These advantages are demonstrated in our study of the effects of unwanted pregnancies on mothers' later life outcomes.

Problem

• Study long-term effects of unwanted pregnancies on mothers' well-being
• Propose two-team cross-screening for exploration, confirmation, and replication
• Address limited data availability with novel observational study method

Innovation

• Two team cross-screening for observational study
• Simultaneous exploration, confirmation, and replication
• Data splitting by meaningful covariate for analysis