My brain hurts.

[Dr Unne]

I got a good lesson in statistics today, and how to make the numbers dance for you. On CNN, I saw an article entitled Study: Teen abstinence no help to later STD rates. ( http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/paren....ap/index.html ) Now that really surprised me. So I read it. Go ahead and read it yourself before my analysis of it.

The article begins:

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.

I read this, and I was like "Wow. That's really strange. People who wait for marriage to have sex end up with STDs in the same amounts as people who don't wait?" That's a safe assumption to make, based on the text, right? It seems to be what the article is saying. So I read on.

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

At this I paused. Using condoms? I thought we were talking about people who wait for marriage? But no, we're talking about abstinence. Are we talking about using condoms when you have sex with your spouse? Confused, I read on.

"The message is really simple: 'Just say no' may work in the short term but doesn't work in the long term."

Thankfully, the message is clearly and simply stated. Abstaining from sex doesn't protect you from STDs in the long term. All those years of abstinence wasted. "Dear me. I better go have some sex right now", I thought. (No, not really.) So I read further.

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

Bearman said that from a statistical point of view the numbers were the same. Overall rates combining all races wouldn't be valid, he said.

Well there you go. Numbers don't lie, right? Look at all those abstainers-before-marriage who end up with STDs.

Well, I read to the end of the article. The VERY LAST LINE says this:

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

Now what the freaking heck. It turns out that the study in the article is comparing people who say they'll have sex (and 99% of which do so), with people who say they won't have sex and 88% of which DO SO ANYWAYS. I re-read the article at this point, and I noticed it never said "People who abstain from sex before marriage", it says "People who PLEDGE to abstain from sex before marriage". Now either I'm a complete moron, or this is just such a shady manipulation of words it boggles my mind.

The only point this article can make is that 88% of people who say they'll abstain, don't, and that people who have sex before marriage are likely to get STDs, and that therefore people who say they'll abstain but don't are as likely as anyone else to get STDs. That is common sense to anyone with a brain. That point is not directly stated anywhere in the text. The text only says "People who say they'll abstain from sex are still likely to get STDs".

And going back to the title of the article: Study: Teen abstinence no help to later STD rates. That's an outright lie, or at the very least is not even dealt with in the article. The article says nothing about people who DO abstain from sex before marriage. 12% of people who do abstain are lumped together in the text with 88% of people who do NOT abstain. The article says nothing about teen abstinence, or teens who practice abstinence. The article says something about teens who LIKE abstinence, or say they believe in it, whether or not they practice it or not.

Now this is not a thread about abstinence, but rather a thread about the media and misinformation. Do you agree that this article is fundmentally misleading? Or am I just dense? Do you agree that most people who read that article will not pick up on what it's really saying? The shady, non-direct way the thing is worded can only lead me to believe that the article is 100% intentionally misleading.

[Kirobaito]

Wow. I was quite surprised by that information.

But yes, it is quite misleading. Saying you'll do something won't do anything, it's only if you actually go through with it. The statistics could be used in a different kind of article, like about how people say they'll abstain but then don't. But not about STD rates. I DEFINITELY know you're not dense, Unne, you're actually quite brilliantly cynical.

But yeah, this article and its writers should be burned immediately.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

I can only imagine why someone would try to maliciously defame abstinence, but yeah, that's obviously what's going on there.

[DocFrance]

It's fun to make statistics work for you. For example, if I didn't want anybody eating T-bone steaks anymore, I could do a "study" and reveal to the public that eating a T-bone steak will double your chances of contracting toenail cancer! Undoubtedly, there would be at least thousands of people out there who would say "Oh teh noes, I don't want teh toenail cancer! I'm nevar eating t-bone stake again!" However, the statistic that I choose not to mention is that your base risk of toenail cancer is around .001%, and doubling that percentage would be just as negligible.

[Kirobaito]

Originally posted by DocFrance
It's fun to make statistics work for you. For example, if I didn't want anybody eating T-bone steaks anymore, I could do a "study" and reveal to the public that eating a T-bone steak will double your chances of contracting toenail cancer! Undoubtedly, there would be at least thousands of people out there who would say "Oh teh noes, I don't want teh toenail cancer! I'm nevar eating t-bone stake again!" However, the statistic that I choose not to mention is that your base risk of toenail cancer is around .001%, and doubling that percentage would be just as negligible.

**will never look at beef the same way again**

[EternalBahamut]

Maybe it is trying to refer to the program not working, that young people are pledging not to have sex and obviously are not following through.

[Reason]

Ouch.

I see headlines that are that shady all the time, to make more people read the article/buy the newspaper, but I've never seen a whole article written that way before. Way misleading. (And why would anybody do such a study in the first place?)

[fire_of_avalon]

So this is an example of bad writing, misuse of information, and brain dead copy editors. meh, it was a boring story anyways. Let's all hope it was some rookie's first day on the job, eh?

[Meow]

Nah, whoever wrote this wrote it carefully. The article's true colors show clearly upon a bit of careful analysis - kudos to Unne - but for the most part, people read news articles on the quick. Plenty of folks might not catch the twist and finish the article thinking they'd just read about the worthlessness of abstinence.

How odd.

[EternalBahamut]

It's funny too, put a statistic next to a statement and it is more believable. .....89%of the people who post about this topic get STDs... probably on of the worst controled studies I've ever read if they even used a control or not.

[Kirobaito]

25% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[Meow]

i heard it was 95.

[eestlinc]

well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that plenty of people who pledge abstinence until marriage end up having sex before marriage anyway. When did they pledge it? High school? Then did they go to college? People change over time. You can be immature and not ready for sexual relationships at 16 and thus say you won't have sex until marriage, but then when you are 20 you might feel a lot more mature and able to handle such relationships, at which point you reëvaluate your choice. It happens all the time.

Anyway, I think the point of the study is to say that when we say "abstinence is the best way to avoid STDs" (which is clear) we ignore the fact that once you do have sex, which many people will do regardless, the best way (besides knowing the sexual history of people you sleep with, monogamy, etc) is to use a condom. By only teaching abstinence and saying that promoting condom use undermines abstinence education, you end up failing to adequately combat STDs. That conclusion seems to support the statistics used here.

[Anaralia]

Huh. When I read the article and got to the end, the conclusion that I came to was that people who pledge abstinence and eventually do have sex anyway trust that nothing will happen to them and don't use protection. Which is kinda what the article said to begin with. Kinda.

The article's objective wasn't to inform, it was to scare the kids who had pledged abstinence, and let them know that they were at as great a risk of getting an STD if they had sex than anybody else. Yes, Unne, you're right in that it's common sense. But evidently, these kids don't know that, or else there wouldn't be a 20% difference in condom use. It would seem that having pledged abstinence gave them a sense of "protection", and shock therapy was needed to bring them out of their stupor.

I think. If I'm wrong, then shame on the writer and his editor. If not, then it was direct manipulation of information with the intent to mislead, but with good intentions. Not that I agree with the tactics used, but I can see why they would do something like this.

[Rei]

It's natural for newspapers, magazines, and the media in general to use sensationalist headlines. Start off with a bang, and all that. Even their stories are going to be a bit too much of this and have too little of that.

I've come to the conclusion that if ANYTHING is alarmist, or whatever the opposite of alarmist is, it's not as bad or good as they make it seem. No one wants to admit that the world we live in is average, as well it should be. All the teen abstinence article says is that we're all pretty much the same, but who wants to read that?

Moderation in everything, I say.