Study: Virginity Pledges Help Teens
N E W Y O R K, Jan. 5 -- Pledging “I won’t” until swearing “I do” is helping teens say “I don’t.”
Those teens who sign on the dotted line, vowing to abstain from sex until marriage, delayed having intercourse about 18 months longer than those who didn’t, a new study says.
These abstinence pledges usually occur at a public event in a church or a school, where the teens make a commitment as a group.
“Our findings surprised us because we didn’t expect to see any effect from these pledges,” says lead investigator Peter S. Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist whose work will be published in the January issue of the American Journal of Sociology.
But the pledging apparently worked: Fifty percent of those who pledged stayed virgins until about age 20, while 50 percent of non-pledgers lost their virginity by age 17.
“This analysis shows that virginity pledges can be an effective tool for delaying sexual intercourse in the teenage years,” says Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.
Alexander says educators and others who work with young people now have sound data to back abstinence approaches when helping teens to avoid early sex and its associated risks.
Analyzing Survey of 90,000 Teens
Bearman and Hannah Bruckner, a sociologist at Yale University, made their conclusions based on data analyzed from the federally sponsored National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a comprehensive survey of approximately 90,000 seventh- through 12th- graders at 145 schools around the United States performed between 1994 and 1996.
The congressionally mandated project involved asking the students questionnaires about their health and beliefs, and in 1994 and 1995 the survey included questions about virginity. Researchers also performed detailed interviews of 20,000 of the teens and their parents in their homes.
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