Anyone involved going to explain the causation?

The only thing I could see was that reduction in delinquency could come from the fact that the early starters tended to become teen mothers, thereby drastically reducing the free time needed for true delinquency. I know we all loved Coal Miner's Daughter, but c'mon.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if the original dumb study and its attendant usage in abstinence-only programs hadn't been attempted in the first place.

Freud would say that repression leads to violence. Not that we should believe Freud, but that is one explanation.

Or, statistical noise combined with study construction.

I'm with norbizness. I'd guess this has to do with teen parents not having time to cause too much trouble. But I'd guess, too, that if they're out having sex against their parents' will they'll have their "rebellion quotient" filled up and won't feel a push to do more.

But losing virginity does not equal being a teen mother.

I have no idea what the causation would be. Personally, this was true for me - I was an early virginity loser and I did not become a juvenile delinquent. I'd probably attribute that to my upbringing, though.

I need help. I feel like I can't trust any study that comes out. The first question that pops into my head is always, "I wonder who's sponsoring this and how they'll make money off of it?" I feel like a jerk when I cite studies to support my arguments because I don't know whether any study is trustworthy or not. I know about the problems with correlation studies, but beyond that how am I expected to pick through all of the information available and decide whose sample size wasn't big enough, or whose question was flawed, or who is simply being dishonest?

Is there a non-partisan group on the internet that provides road-side analysis of these studies as they come along? Because they fly in so fast and furious nowadays that my bullshit meter never stops pinging, no matter what the conclusions are.

Well, Sgzax, I guess you just have to dig and figure out who's funding the study. If the American Life League has paid for a study re: post-abortion-syndrome you can probably assume it's gonna be biased.

If only it was always as simple as that. Maybe there should be a law requiring everyone to name their interest groups in a way that makes it easy to identify their biases.

In the meantime it is valid to be concerned about the fact that most of us aren't trained to adequately evaluate the reliability of these studies. It's more honest than just cherry-picking the ones with conclusions we like, at any rate.

A critical web-site would be very welcome. They could establish what the criteria of a reliable study would be, and rate studies that come out against those standards. Adequate sample size? Check. Analysis of possible biases? Check. This or that other criteria? Check. Our assessment of study reliability: some well-defended and explained number.

Man, I would love that site.

Very interesting link.

I liked the discussion about the connection between breast-feeding and IQ of children, which are positively correlated. It so happens that the causality goes like that: breast-feeding mothers tend to have higher IQ, and IQ is largely inherited. But a more hopeful spin is that a young mother can increase her IQ by breastfeeding.

I also think that the decision on the form of sex education is more a moral issue then inherent merit issue. It so happens that abstinence only education plugs a pretty big dollop of lies to kids which is, well, immoral. The second thing is how bad very early sex is, I would say, not good but not "Oh my God!" kind of bad. It is like bicycling upside-down, with legs on the handlebars, definitely a risky kind of behavior, but teaching kids that upside-down position leads by itself to a brain damage would be just harmful (they know it is false) while wearing helmets and gloves would be helpful. And even when they know how to use helmets and gloves, they can be informed that there can be adverse conseqences.

Q-- I was just thinking that depending on the area they were sampling in and the size of the sample, what teen mothers there were could have skewed the results a bit.

sgyzax: That's a brilliant idea. Too bad no one would ever fund it enough to cover all the thousands of studies that come out a year... The could even have a feed that gave you the most recent highly reliable studies, so you could read what science had ACTUALLY indicated lately. It might even improve the industries'tactics if it was popular enough.

I don't know how I feel about this. Losing one's virginity early makes one less likely to be a delinquent? Really?

An above poster said it was true that she, an early-virginity-loser was not a delinquent. But then, I lost my virginity at 18 and I wasn't a delinquent either (I consider early to be 13-15 or so). None of my friends were delinquents, and the earliest one to have sex was 17. The rest were 18-20. Of the "delinquents" I knew, most were having sex by 14. But then, a girl I knew who had sex that young, and started smoking cigarettes and pot at around that age, did very well academically.

Basically, it's not that I doubt that people can have sex whenever they feel they're ready, but rather that I find it very hard to believe that having sex young is a direct deterrent to behaving 'badly', which the study seems to imply.

I don't know how I feel about this. Losing one's virginity early makes one less likely to be a delinquent? Really?

An above poster said it was true that she, an early-virginity-loser was not a delinquent. But then, I lost my virginity at 18 and I wasn't a delinquent either (I consider early to be 13-15 or so). None of my friends were delinquents, and the earliest one to have sex was 17. The rest were 18-20. Of the "delinquents" I knew, most were having sex by 14. But then, a girl I knew who had sex that young, and started smoking cigarettes and pot at around that age, did very well academically.

Basically, it's not that I doubt that people can have sex whenever they feel they're ready, but rather that I find it very hard to believe that having sex young is a direct deterrent to behaving 'badly', which the study seems to imply.

I'm 25 and still a virgin. (Heck, I've never even kissed anyone in a romantic and/or sexual way.) I'm not sure if I would count as a "delinquent" or not; if I wasn't a genius at academic work, I probably wouldn't have gotten away with even a small fraction of the stuff I've done. (Almost none of it hurt anyone else, though.)

Well, I feel cheated. I didn't lose my virginity until quite late in the game, and I don't think I was a delinquent, either. I didn't get to have any fun as a teenager.

I did drink a lot, starting from the age of 16. Does that count as delinquency? I want some points.

piotrek- There's an article in this week's Economist about the breast feeding/IQ correlation. It pretty much says that it comes from a specific gene that interacts with breast milk in a certain way. Some people have it, some people don't. If you get it from both parents, then your IQ goes through the roof. They speculate about why the gene that doesn't lead to a higher IQ hasn't died out yet through evolution. Very interesting stuff.

sgzax, I'd say the best way to feel you can trust research is to check out the original publication. (Google Scholar has made it a lot easier to get journal articles, and many public libraries will also have access to them if you don't have access to a university library). Peer-reviewed journals have a pretty intensive review process before a study gets published (reviewers would critique things like sample size), and the authors will list their funding sources at the end of the article. If the study isn't published in a peer-reviewed journal, I tend to take that as a bad sign in terms of its reliability and/or neutrality. It's not perfect, but it definitely gives you more information.

It is really really difficult to prove causation. From my experience, it really depends on the situation surrounding the loss of virginity. If you do it because you feel socially pressured to (which is the case a lot of the time when you're younger and more naive), you're probably going to be more easily pressured into other things. That said, I don't buy the above study at all.

piotrek - i think you are right that it is a moral issue. once you've convinced kids that they are already facing eternal damnation for having sex, all the other "delinquent" behavior probably doesn't seem so bad, or even relevant to your soul!

so it would seem that if you are taught sex is morally wrong, early sex might make you do other 'bad' things. but if you are having sex early because you were taught that it wasn't the end of the world, it probably didn't wreck your self esteem and lead to potentially dangerous behavior.

piotrek - i think you are right that it is a moral issue. once you've convinced kids that they are already facing eternal damnation for having sex, all the other "delinquent" behavior probably doesn't seem so bad, or even relevant to your soul!

so it would seem that if you are taught sex is morally wrong, early sex might make you do other 'bad' things. but if you are having sex early because you were taught that it wasn't the end of the world, it probably didn't wreck your self esteem and lead to potentially dangerous behavior.