Drop in Teen Sex not so Dramatic After All

Remember last week, when every major news outlet was declaring Teen Sex Practically Goes Away! and I explained that the sexual behavior data was not new, focused on change since 1991, was a bit misleading as to the overall rate, was statistically unchanged when compared with 2003 data, and I didn’t know why an old report was getting so much attention all of the sudden? Well, it seems that the Washington Post has finally caught on.

In their first article on the topic, they reported, “the percentage of high school students engaging in sexual behavior remained relatively stable. About 47 percent of high school students — 4.6 million teens — reported having had sexual intercourse in 2005, down from 54 percent in 1991.” Contrast “relatively stable” with “down 54 percent,” and you’ll see why the focus has been on that 54% figure. A huge percentage decrease gets attention – comparing that to what the current realistic picture is does not.

Today, the WP has a new piece, Teen Sex Rates Stop Falling, Data Show, which notes this bit of data underreported in last week’s breathless articles released by major news outlets:

The most recent survey data, from 2005, was released last year, but attention focused primarily on the overall change in sexual behavior from 1991 to 2005 – both when the CDC initially reported the data in June and again earlier this month when the findings were highlighted in an annual federal report on the well-being of U.S. children. That comparison shows a significant drop, from 54 percent to nearly 47 percent, in the proportion of teenagers who said they had ever had sex. The fraction who said they had sex in the past three months fell from 37 percent to 34 percent.

 

Largely unnoticed was that the percentages for both measures did not change significantly between 2001 and 2005. In response to a request from The Washington Post, the CDC analyzed the data for that time period to validate statistically that the rates had leveled off, for all grades, for both boys and girls and across all racial groups.

 

“We found that, over that time period, there were no changes in the overall percent of high school students who had ever had sex,” said Laura K. Kann, who heads the survey project at the CDC. “It has decreased over the whole time from 1991, but there’s been no change since 2001. There was flatness for all the subgroups for all the variables.”

A look at the WP article suggests why old data over such a long time was being so widely reported and somewhat misrepresented:

The halt in the downward trend coincided with an increase in federal spending on programs focused exclusively on encouraging sexual abstinence until marriage, several experts noted. Congress is currently debating funding for such efforts, which receive about $175 million a year in federal money and have come under fire from some quarters for being ineffective….The House last week approved a $28 million increase in spending on abstinence programs…

I’m not making any statements here about what the baseline rate for teen sex should be. However, I’m guessing that the news outlets who parroted the drop in teen sex were getting press releases from pro-abstinence-only folks (whether .org or .gov) whose funding was up for debate, and rushed to print this “dramatic” news without properly checking their facts. And by “dramatic news,” I mean old news that doesn’t mean what you think it means. Kudos to the Post for following up on the facts – too bad they didn’t investigate further on the first go around. It took me less than half an hour to dig up the inconsistencies between data and reporting that I previously described. Perhaps they could use a medical librarian. Perhaps when journalists start getting new releases of old data when new money depends on it, they’ll do a little digging themselves next time.