On 26 Feb 2010 at 13:18, [email protected] wrote: > Yes, really. A red flag should be raised and we should ALL consider the > possibility that this type of > study would suffer from the same type of taint that - oh, let's say, a highly > praised study of the > alleged effectiveness of abstinence education would raise.
Well, at the risk of demonstrating Nancy's point, I have to say that that particular politically-charged study does, in fact, deserve critical scrutiny. http://tinyurl.com/y8m63mf http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/education/03abstinence.ht ml or http://tinyurl.com/yeg6p9a Its main problem is that following an 8-hour intervention teaching 12-year-olds that it's not a good idea for them to have sex, the assessment 2 years later consisted in asking them whether they did. Fewer did than in the control group. This may be because the intervention was effective, but it may also be because what they learned from the intervention was that it's not a good idea to tell adults that you had sex. Or that, having had the teaching, they told the researchers what they wanted to hear. Especially as they were being paid $20 a session. In a study like this, the veracity of self-reports of sexual activity is uncertain. But even if there were some objective way of assessing sexual behaviour, the study would still have a problem. Its goal is to prevent sexual activity in 12-year-olds. If this goal is based on moral or religious grounds, the measure should be whether sexual activity is prevented. But hopefully these researchers don't want to reduce sexual activity because it's wicked, but because sexual activity at such a young age leads to harmful outcomes, such as pregnancy and STDs. So the real bottom line would be to use these outcomes as true objective measures of the success of the programme. This means that, except for those for whom early sex is a moral issue, it's not important whether the tweenies stopped having sex. What is important is whether abstinence-only education reduced pregnancies and STD's. Did it? We don't know because they didn't report this information. And on the face of it, it seems to me that a group receiving safe sex education as well as an abstinence message would have an advantage on such measures. Perhaps they'll get around to testing that one day. Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=915 or send a blank email to leave-915-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
