Maryland, United States, January 3: A new study suggests that the students with strong religious backgrounds become sexually active at about 21 on average, regardless of whether they took a pledge to remain a virgin until marriage.
The study author, Janet E. Rosenbaum, a post doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared the sexual activity of adolescent virginity pledgers with matched non-pledgers.
"Previous studies found that pledgers were more likely to delay having sex than non-pledgers," said Rosenbaum, "I used the same data as previous studies but a different statistical method."
For the study, Rosenbaum collected data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. She took the data of 934 high school students, including 289 students who were 17 years old on average in 1996 when they took a virginity pledge, and 645 teens who did not take a pledge but were otherwise similar. Rosenbaum matched both the students.
After five years, the study found "The behavior of teenagers who have never been to church before is pretty irrelevant when understanding the behavior virginity pledgers."
Overall, religious students, regardless of whether they take virginity pledges, are more conservative than their non-religious peers. When compared against national averages, "they are having sex an average of about three years later than the average American," Rosenbaum said.
"It is something that I think can be looked on as encouraging," she said. "Kids who are choosing to be religious are also choosing to abstain."
The researcher found that both pledgers and non pledgers are similar when it comes to premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, anal and oral sex variables and other sexual behavior.
She also found that adolescents who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than closely matched adolescents who do not take pledges; but they are less likely to use birth control and condoms. Rosenbaum said that Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents.
"It's really vital for kids to learn accurate and comprehensive information about birth control, including how to use condoms in school," Rosenbaum said. "But on the other hand, schools can't be doing it all. Parents have to be teaching their kids about sex."
The research was approved by the Harvard University Human Subjects Board. The results of this study appear in the January issue of Pediatrics.
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