Quote:
Originally Posted by sixpakistan
Yeah, I was evaluating effectiveness based on whether or not they engaged in sex, not whether or not they got STDs. Guess it depends on what the goals of the abstinence program are. If it's simply to get young kids to stop having premarital sex for the sake of it, that's one thing, and if it's to reduce STD risk, that's obviously another. In this society you can effectively do the latter, but probably not the former.
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The outcomes of the interventions that were studied were teenage pregnancy and incidence of STDs (i've read studies that didnt include the teen pregnancy portion).
Whether or not kids engaged in sex would be very hard to study in a scientific manner because it would be based on self-report rather than an easily documented outcome like pregnancy or new infection with chlamydia.
As an effective public health program, abstinence-only sex ed is inferior. The problem is that politics gets injected into it. For example, take the idiotic comment by the republican politician who suggests that it is elitist for scientists to consider the results of multiple randomized controlled studies as definitive factors in evaluating public health interventions. Issues like this can never be approached in a truly scientific way
ws