You mean, abstinence-only programs might actually work?
We now have some convincing evidence that abstinence-only sexual education programs for teens, long derided as a counterproductive waste of time, actually work.
This is news. This particular study has drawn attention because it is especially well-designed and includes longer follow-ups than usual.
The Obama administration had previously cut funding for abstinence-only programs. But it has also launched “a $114 million pregnancy prevention initiative that will fund only programs that have been shown scientifically to work.” Therefore these new findings may result in a re-evaluation, and perhaps even funding for the programs:
Based on the findings, Obama administration officials said programs like the one evaluated in the study could be eligible for federal funding.
“No one study determines funding decisions, but the findings from the research paper suggest that this kind of project could be competitive for grants if there’s promise that it achieves the goal of teen pregnancy prevention,” said Nicholas Papas, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
There are always big problems with policy decisions of this type: research using human subjects is notoriously difficult to design and execute in a scientifically rigorous, consistently replicable, and meaningful way. It is only over time that trustworthy patterns emerge, and even then evaluators must try to look at only the most well-designed studies. That, unfortunately, is not always or even often done. Research that is essentially garbage in and out is often considered on an equal basis, and politics may subtly shape the way researchers frame their results.
A couple of interesting facts about the study itself: the results, although significant, were modest. In a population of sixth- and seventh-graders who were followed for two years after going through the abstinence-only program, 33 percent had sex, compared with 52 percent who were taught only safe sex (there were other findings, too, but that was the most important one). The students were African-American teens in public schools in an unspecified Northeastern city.
The sobering fact is that this means that, for either intervention, an awful lot of kids in eight and ninth grades have already had sex. And this phenomenon is hardly limited to the population in the study. There are so many other forces pushing young teens in that direction, and so few acting as a brake, that the task is especially daunting.
Yet another interesting fact embedded in the article is that the program studied involved only eight hours of instruction. That’s something, but it’s not a whole lot in the scheme of things. Would more time spent yield even better results?
The left has been disregarding abstinence-only programs for quite some time, considering them to be a waste of time and money. This study may or may not change things. But it spotlights a larger problem for policy-setting on social and health issues in general: we must take outcome research into account, or we risk spinning our wheels or worse—but the research itself is often so inconsistent and poorly designed that it is difficult to have much confidence in the results.
And yet, decisions must be made. They are often based on nothing more than hunches, political leanings and preferences, and the needs of special interest groups, supported by bad science. You could say the same for global warming, or any number of other areas in which science, social policy, and politics intersect.
[ADDENDUM: Stuart Schneiderman has more to say.]
Are they going to keep funding Head Start, which has 40 years of being documented not to work?
Gingo: I don’t think it tends to work the other way.
and politics may subtly shape the way researchers frame their results.
Whoa! Next you will be telling me that respected researchers threw away closets-full of data because it didn’t agree with the political point they were trying to make and Nobody is going to believe THAT!
Dear Neo,
Blockquote>The left has been disregarding abstinence-only programs for quite some time, considering them to be a waste of time and money.
Can we stop calling them the left? They are not sinister. They are deranged and they move in lockstep. I think The Borg would be better.
They don’t care about effectiveness. They care about abortion. They care so much they can’t make any sense about it.
They want to make abortion safe, legal, and rare. If it’s just a matter of tissue-discarding then why is rare a goal? We don’t have a similar mantra for appendectomies. If it is a manner of infanticide, then why is rare acceptable?
I’m not an anti-abortion partisan. If infanticide was good enough for Sophocles, it’s good enough for me. But you can not dispute the fact that abortion is some kind of psychic purification ritual for those who are members of the Borg. Obama even voted against a bill that would have mandated medical care for aborted babies who were sufficiently uncool to survive the procedure and the reason he did this was to keep those Hyde Park Borg happy.
So don’t suggest that they are influenced by something like results.
P.S. I see I have done it again. I know hyperlynx in comments are a little outre but some things are allowable when done in self-defense. Homicide. Hyperlynx.
There is a plug-in which allows the hapless commenter to preview his hodge-podge of unmatched tags before putting them up where they can annoy everybody.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-comment-preview/
It’s also difficult to disentangle which of the massive social interventions is doing what. We can go back to the Moynhihan report and discuss the findings vis a vis the illegitimacy rates and the direct correlation to the welfare state. So let’s have an intervention for that intervention and so on. Social interventions by government are generally a failure. Unless the point is to increase the power of those responsible for the intervention, then perhaps they are all successes.
The problem was never that parents coudn’t do the sex ed thing at home, but that when offered the chance to off-load a painful chore they jumped at the chance.
Unfortunately the name ‘Abstinence only’ was tagged on what had been the received wisdom of adults for a very long time (and still is by the way). IT was deliberate and used to imply some sort of Amish style social style (nothing wrong with that mind you). Thinking about it clearly for even a few minutes, the idea that adults and particularly adults in authority would tell kids its a bad idea to have teenage sex would be a winner.
This is part and parcel of the terrible trend to allow kids to run the show.
What would Lady GaGa do?
The Schneiderman post is excellent. Thanks, Neo.
“The problem was never that parents couldn’t do the sex ed thing at home, but that when offered the chance to off-load a painful chore they jumped at the chance.”
That’s not true. I, and a lot of other parents I knew back in the day when our kids were of an age to begin understanding these matters, undertook the task ourselves quite willingly, and many included our churches in the effort. I’ve never known any parent who “jumped at the chance” to have schools pick it up–certainly not the public schools. Now, there are certainly parents who’d prefer to either abdicate or ignore the responsibility, but I don’t think most prefer to do so–or at least didn’t prefer that. Conscientious and caring parents in close families are pretty generally aware that schools have a helluva time even teaching things as basic as arithmetic and writing well–why on earth would we trust them with something as sensitive as sexuality? And the answer is, we wouldn’t.
I think the problem is more that educators have arrogated to themselves both the task and content of sex education because they intend to control the message. So they advanced and promoted the myth that if they didn’t do it, no one would. That’s always been a lie, in my opinion. I’m sure there were/are some parents at the margins (and more in certain social settings) who were reluctant to do it, but I don’t think it’s ever been enough to require the wholesale public appropriation we see today, and which many if not most people have really kind of accepted, by now, as just the way it is.
That being said, I think you’re on to something in noting that it’s about letting the kids run the show. However, I think it’s more about having it seem like the kids are running the show. It’s more about having the educators (who are pretty uniformly leftist) run the show. It’s an effort to inject the state between children and their parents.
I guess this all shows, yet again, that I’m a lunatic paranoid drooling knuckle-dragging wing-nut fascist. Oh well–we are what we are!
Well I just read Schneiderman. Excellent! Thanks, neo.
I was shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to see that in the Washington Post, of all places…although, in all fairness, they’ve been gravitating towards the center in recent years.
“Writing on the wall”, anyone? 😉
The left is about training people to be helpless. The more helpless you feel, the more you’re willing to turn over your life to the political process. You’re the victim of economic forces; turn yourself over to a union and they’ll take care of you. You’re the victim of racial/gender forces; quotas and preferences are the only way to get your fair share. Impossible to save for retirement; the as yet unborn “promise” to take care of you.
Sex is where the training starts. The liberal message is that teens are helpless before their hormones. Since they can chart no course of action for themselves, society must provide safe sex and abortion to limit the consequences. Start a person into adulthood by challenging them to take control of their decisions leads to all sorts of, to the left, undesirable attitudes. If work, finances, temptation, relationships are subject, more rather than less, to individual decisions, the politician offering “help” in exchange for power can be told to buzz off.
How does the line go?
They told me if I voted for John McCain that public health policy decisions would be made based on narrow ideology views rather than science… and they were right!
In this case, social science… that happened to break towards the conservative viewpoint…
Whenever I see the word expert I immediately begin looking for confirmation of my belief that on the expert mother planet the sky is of a constantly changing color and Schneiderman provided it early on:
This may be because on Schneiderman’s planet fathers are blasé to the point of invisibility or are actually invisible.
On planet NOLA, however, the Nimrod knows that fathers are the ones more likely to go overboard on the chastity question because they clearly remember their urgent, throbbing, ineluctable mandate to show their love for their girl and the best way they could do this was by sticking it in, that it wasn’t just about sex, but about a transcendental, timeless bond (viz. Romeo and Juliet) which need is frequently exhibited by male politicians because they have so much love to give.