FRACTAL SCALING OF THE TEEN BIRTH PHENOMENON

Abstract

The collective behavior of complex physical models has often been used to model complex social phenomena. Herein, we describe one such process using a fractal stochastic point process. A coarse-graining of the relative dispersion, the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean in a time-series, is shown to decrease as a modulated inverse power law in time. This is an empirically motivated (renormalization group) model of teen birth statistics and only indirectly addresses the social mechanisms that promote sexual activity, subsequent pregnancy and finally child birth. This prediction agrees with the statistics observed across 27 years of data in Texas, and among twelve different Texan regions with differing demographics for 16 years.