Much of the practice of community health nurses is focused on health promotion. Nurse-client contracting has been used with clients experiencing hypertension, diabetes, or arthritis. A study was conducted to determine whether nurse-client contracting would be useful as a method for providing nursing care to assist sexually active young women to reduce their risk of having an unintended pregnancy. The pretest-posttest field experiment involved subjects in two contracting groups and one control group. Of subjects involved in contracting, 50 received a client-selected reinforcer for each contract fulfilled and 51 received no reinforcers. The 101 contracting subjects wrote a total of 286 contracts. The family planning nurse-client contracting process included four phases: assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The results indicated that subjects chose a wide variety of behaviors for their contracts. Both of the contracting groups wrote approximately the same number of contracts. Subjects who received reinforcers fulfilled significantly more of their written contracts than did subjects in the non-reinforcement group. Subjects who did not receive reinforcers were significantly more likely to drop out of the study than those who received reinforcers. Although both forms of contracting resulted in positive gains in subject knowledge and health behavior, these findings indicated that contracting with reinforcement had definite advantages over contracting without reinforcements. (NB)