{"id":4454,"date":"2005-06-15T10:56:51","date_gmt":"2005-06-15T14:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4454.html"},"modified":"2005-06-15T10:56:51","modified_gmt":"2005-06-15T14:56:51","slug":"the-compound-fraud-of-abstinence-only-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-compound-fraud-of-abstinence-only-programs\/","title":{"rendered":"The compound fraud of abstinence-only programs"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most comprehensive study ever done on adolescent health and sexuality was completed this year. Subsidized by 17 separate agencies of the federal government — to the tune of $45 million — investigators interviewed more than 20,000 young people. What did researchers learn? That abstinence only and “virginity pledges” don’t work<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Sex education doesn’t cause all these negative outcomes. What causes these negative outcomes is kids who are having sex and aren’t protecting themselves,” says Columbia University’s Peter Bearman. [….]<\/p>\n

“The downside is that, when they have sex, pledgers are one-third less likely to use condoms at first sex,” says Bearman. “So all of the benefit of the delay in terms of pregnancy-risk and in terms of STD acquisition — poof — it just disappears because they’re so much less likely to use a condom at first sex.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Teenagers exposed to the federally-funded abstinence lessons don’t use contraception, are more likely to have oral and anal sex (in order to technically preserve their “virginity”), are less likely to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, and less likely to discuss sexual health with their doctor. Perhaps most importantly, 88% of the teenagers who go through these abstinence programs — nearly nine out of 10 — end up having sex before marriage.<\/p>\n

That is, if you’re in the reality-based community. If you find the evidence inconvenient, as conservatives do, you reject the research, snub the scholars, and pretend that the data confirms all of your beliefs anyway.
\n
\nAs James Dobson’s Focus on the Family put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Virginity pledge programs don’t work, and the teens who pledge abstinence are more likely to engage in riskier sex — at least according to a March report in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Unsatisfied with that conclusion, The Heritage Foundation re-examined the same data — and found the opposite to be true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, who’s right? The scholars and the Department of Health and Human Services or the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s leading conservative think tank? I haven’t seen the Heritage study, but apparently their research methods leave something to be desired<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Independent experts called the new findings provocative, but criticized the Heritage team’s analysis as flawed and lacking the statistical evidence to back its conclusions. The new findings have not been submitted to a journal for publication, an author said. The independent experts who reviewed the study said the findings were unlikely to be published in their present form. […]<\/p>\n

The team needs to do “a lot of work” on its paper, said David Landry, a senior research associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York. He said in an interview that it was “a glaring error” to use the result of a statistical test at a 0.10 level of significance when journals generally use a lower and more rigorous level of 0.05. <\/p>\n

Dr. Johnson, a co-author, defended the team’s methods and said many journal articles used the higher level and let readers decide the merits of the findings. <\/p>\n

Mr. Landry also criticized the Heritage team’s reliance on self-reports of sexually transmitted diseases among those who took the pledge, saying that group would be less likely to report them. “The underreporting problem is so severe that it makes that data highly questionable,” Mr. Landry said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note to the folks at Heritage: take a refresher in quantitative analysis. Yes, it can be challenging, but you can avoid embarrassments like this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most comprehensive study ever done on adolescent health and sexuality was completed this year. Subsidized by 17 separate agencies of the federal government — to the tune of $45 million — investigators interviewed more than 20,000 young people. What did researchers learn? That abstinence only and “virginity pledges” don’t work. “Sex education doesn’t cause […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}