Can’t keep quiet…
Mar 26th, 2008 by admin
… but having a very hard time thinking of what to say! Argh… Don’t you hate that.
I’m here steaming over an article I just read in response to a twitter post that one of the gals that I follow and respect posted. Her tweet “New Blog Sex Ed Study Shows More Pregnancy in Abstinence Only Programs”. Of course my curiosity is peaked, so I head on over to her link to read what she had to say.
Her blog post refers to a “national comparison” article with the title “UWresearches say comprehensive sex ed cuts teen pregnancies.”
Their “national sampling” is of about 1700 teens, aged 15-19. Interesting. Aren’t most 18 and 19 year olds now a days considered adults? Seems strange they’d lump them into a group with 15-17 high school aged kids but ok…
Then they say this other interesting little fact about the study…
“When differences in race, age, gender and family makeup were taken into account, students who’d had comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to report a pregnancy than those without any sex education and 50 percent less likely than the abstinence-only group.” (italics mine)
Wait a second… what does THAT exactly mean? The only factor that should matter regarding pregnancy - meaning the ones actually reporting being pregnant would be the gender of the kids - or am I missing something? Seems to me they could taint this study any way they wanted to with those other factors “taken into account”?
And then there’s the whole “likely to report a pregnancy” line in there. Couldn’t that just mean that the kids getting the “comprehensive sex ed” might still be getting pregnant and aborting and NOT REPORTING IT????
What in the world does this study prove anyway? Seems to me the only thing it might prove is that the kids who get abstinence only education might tend more to be pro-life (anti-abortion) - and so if they do happen to have sex and get pregnant they won’t run off and abort the baby before anyone else finds out - which means they’d actually report the pregnancy. It in NO way proves that just because kids are getting all the other stuff they’re not getting pregnant.
UGH - see what I mean… so hard to explain why I’m frustrated here!!!
I’m not trying to make a point here for abstinence or not - I just am so tired of these studies which claim facts that aren’t there or turn facts around to make it sound like something else.
“When differences in race, age, gender and family makeup were taken into account”
This is common statistical analysis. It means the researchers normalize the different groups the best they can statistically. Otherwise, if more of the abstinence-only kids were also poor, or inner city children of teen parents, then those other factors they share in common would confound the data. I think the 18-19 year olds were included because they were still high school students at the time of the study.
I enjoyed browsing through your blog. It’s good to read other view points and look at things from the other side of the fence.
-Kristie
I think one thing we should always keep in mind when looking at study findings is to consider who might be funding the study - a possible alterior motive to presenting the results in one light or another. Sometimes there is an underlying agenda involved. This is something I became more aware of when taking quantitative and qualitative stats (research methods) in university…you make a very good point about the possibility of under reporting as well. In my criminology studies this was called the ‘dark figure’ of crime stats. Great blog