Study: Abstinence pledges not reducing rates of STDs

AP via USA Today ^ | 9 March 2004

[Fractal Trader]

Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don't pledge abstinence, according to a study that examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents. Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups' STD rates were statistically similar.

[Fractal Trader]

• 99 percent of non-pledgers and 88% of pledgers have sex before marriage.

I guess this means you can be assured of losing your virginity if you just decide not to take the pledge.

[Monti Cello]

Newsflash!! AP prematurely ejaculates over abstinence study!!

The point you highlight is key.

The issue is not who writes on a piece of paper that they will abstain, but who actually does abstain.

[Steve Eisenberg]

Overall rates combining all races wouldn't be valid, he said.

Um, yep, that makes sense because taking all the groups together, in a sample size of 12,000, shows that the pledgers had a 15-20% lower STD rate. This is would fit with the liberal agenda. The only group that went the way the article authors wanted were the Asians. Wouldn't their rates be least valid since there were fewer of them?

Where did the kids take this pledge? Probably at school. This just shows that school sex ed is nonsense; few of the children probably took their pledge seriously, and those few are why the pledgers had a lower STD rate.

Without reading the study, one can't really evaluate the study. For example, how did they know who had a SDT? Self-report would be highly dubious with the loosest kids probably being the biggest liars.

[HitmanLV]

I never took a pledge and I was a virgin until past 18. Then again, no women would talk to me back then...

[the right side jedi]

I see nothing in this study to indicate whether they looked at only kids who've had sex or all kids who've pledged. In fact, reading through it, I think they only looked at pledgers who've broken it. Looking at the 99- non pledgers vs 88 % pledgers sex before marriage statistic, there's at least 12% of pledgers who don't have STDs. This is clearly not factored in their statistics of STDs pledgers vs. non-pledgers. There's a lot of things in this study that I think are carefully worded to send a certain anti-abstience education message by only looking at people who have broken the pledge and not really being clear about it.

[monkey]

"It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex," said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University's Department of Sociology

Why, that's the old bumper sticker about war, except they substituted "sex" for "war" and Peter Bearman for Albert Einstein. It shows the true analytical level of a sociologist.

Bearman said that from a statistical point of view the numbers were the same.

What a moronic statement. No one with any statistics background would make it.

[BkBinder]

I'd be real curious to get some stats that weren't presented.

1. As percentiles, at what ages did representatives of pledgers and non-pledgers lose their virginity? 2. As percentiles, how many partners did each have? 3. Of those who had relations with only one partner, how many of those married that partner?

Looks to me that they chose stats that would reinforce their view rather than report the facts. It might be embarrassing for the media to report that 27% of non-pledgers had sex at 13 and only 1% of pledgers did. Or that 65% of pledgers married the only partner they ever had versus 14% marrying their 6th.

[Antoninus]

Interesting use of statistics by the "unbiased" AP:

The study found that the STD rates for whites who pledged virginity was 2.8% compared with 3.5% for those who didn't pledge.

So what does that mean in terms of real numbers? If extrapolated to a sample of, say, 1,000,000 whites, 28,000 pledgers got STDs and 35,000 of the non-pledgers did likewise, for a difference of 7,000. This number (7,000) is 20% of the 35,000 who would have gotten STDs anyway.

Similarly, extrapolated for 1,000,000 blacks, 181,000 pledgers got STDs and 203,000 of the non-pledgers did likewise, for a difference of 22,000. This number is about 10% of the 203,000 who would have gotten STDs anyway.

Extrapolated for 1,000,000 Asians--56,000 pledgers got STDs and 105,000 of the non-pledgers did likewise, for a difference of 49,000. This number is about 50%(!) of the 105,000 who would have gotten STDs anyway.

Finally, extrapolated for 1,000,000 Hispanics--67,000 pledgers got STDs and 86,000 of the non-pledgers did likewise, for a difference of 19,000. This number is about 22% of the 86,000 who would have gotten STDs anyway.

If the media was to use the same statistical methods that they used to hype AIDS on these statistics, the headline of this article would have been:

Abstinence pledges reduce rates of STDs by 50% among asian-american teenagers; 20% among whites and hispanics

Also, notice that in not one of the groups was the rate of STDs *higher* among the abstinence pledgers than among the non-pledgers. And yet, the solution is yet more sex education. As one who lived through sex ed 4 times in elementary school and high school, I speak from experience when I say what's taught in sex ed to 11 and 12 year olds today would have been "corrupting the morals of a minor" 40 years ago.

[yevgenie]

Good catch. I was about to point out the doublespeak.
"Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier."

Wait a sec, the above statement would imply that these 12 to 18 year olds are "abstaining from sex until marriage", but still having sex with multiple people? What, is the divorce rate very high among these 12-18-year-olds?

[lewislynn]

Abstinence pledges not reducing rates of STDs

They lied.

[Antoninus]

Abstinence pledges reduce rates of STDs by 50% among asian-american teenagers; 20% among whites and hispanics

Oooops, totally misread the stats on the asians. They were the only group where the pledgers had more STDs than the non-pledgers.

[yevgenie]

"It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex," said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University's Department of Sociology.
No offense to any sociologist Freepers, but in my experience, not a single one of the 28 Sociologists I have met (including the big famous ones) has impressed me with having a grasp of statistics.

When I was in college, a couple of math professors and I would go to the talks by world-renowned sociologists, sit in the back, and snicker as they tried to wow us with their mathematical wizardry. (I have only been guilty of asking leading and disturbing questions 3 times--I got kicked out for disrupting the meeting on my last event after I demonstrated that the previous hour's worth of lecture was a fraud . . .)

[Antoninus]

I'd also like to know what they considered an STD for the purposes of this study.

[cyborg]

I question pledges and such viscerally emotional gestures. Britney made one and Jessica made one, one stayed a virgin and one did not (among famous people). I meet a lot of girls who waited till they were in their twenties and even thirties and forties to have sex.

I didn't make any pledges but I managed to keep my legs closed through college. Aside from firebreathing lectures from parents about ending up on home relief with a baby,diseases and all that, I just had better things to do like study.

Media makes sex way too overrated for young people. It is not an experience for children.

[fso301]

The problem, the study found, is that those virginity "pledgers" are much less likely to use condoms.

Perhaps they are more likely to be associated with a religion that doesn't allow the use of birth control devices.

The study found that the STD rates for whites who pledged virginity was 2.8% compared with 3.5% for those who didn't pledge. For blacks, it was 18.1% and 20.3%. For Asians, 10.5% of virginity pledgers had STDs compared with 5.6% of non-pledgers. For Hispanics, it was 6.7% and 8.6%.

I would seriously examine the measurement techniques because there seems to be a problem with the data for Asians. Never-the-less, there is a measureable benefit to being a virgin pledge as shown by the lower STD rates for whites, blacks and hispanics.

[monkey]

Yeah, they're very defensive about it.

Look at some of their PhD dissertations some time. It's usually some poorly-done ordinary least squares regression. And those are the "technical" sociologists.

[DaBroasta]

Funny this "report" comes out the day after President Bush pi$$ed off the NEA terrorists and the RAT media by proposing to double spending on abstinence education.

[Jaysun]

"..Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University's Department of Sociology, who co-authored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale."

These two guys were involved in another study entitled:

Promising the Future:
Virginity Pledges as they Affect Transition to First Intercourse.
July 15, 2000

I have provided a link to the full report below. It appears that this article is a farce. They say some interesting things in the above mentioned report such as:

"Hispanics and Asians are less likely to use contraceptives than whites."
"adolescents that pledge.... are much less likely, than adolescents who do not pledge, to have sex."
"Taking a pledge delays intercourse for a long time."

http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/downloads/other/psb17/virginity.pdf

[spetznaz]

They lied.

Why?

[nmh]

Sheer bull!

If a people abstain they will NOT get an STD. If you think by abstaining they DO get an STD, please explain how this can happen.