The study, Evaluating the Adoption Component of AFL Care Projects, 1989-1990, was designed to determine if any of the actions taken by Adolescent Family Life (AFL) pregnancy counseling programs have an effect on the likelihood that pregnant adolescent clients will elect to place their children for adoption. Since 1982, the AFL Program of the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) has sponsored a number of demonstration projects that provide health, education and social services for pregnant teenagers, teenage mothers and their families. By legislative mandate, each of these projects is required to have an adoption counseling component designed to increase the exposure of clients to the adoption alternative. These projects vary widely in their organizational characteristics, the approaches used to provide adoption counseling, the characteristics of clients served, and the characteristics of the communities within which they operate. They also differ in the percentage of pregnant adolescents served who choose adoption - from 0 to nearly 35 percent.

Many factors affect a program's relinquishment rate. Programs serve clients with widely varying individual characteristics, including different intentions regarding the pregnancy when they first make contact with the agency. In addition, because programs operate in very different social contexts, various approaches to pregnancy counseling may result in very different outcomes. Because of these confounding effects, this study collected data on the programs themselves as well as individual-level data from the clients served. This study gathered data on 314 variables from 869 AFL clients from 29 AFL project sites.