My Baltimore Sun op-ed defending O'Donnell on abstinence, but not on poverty

My op-ed in today's Baltimore Sun says that O'Donnell's personal religious beliefs about abstinence and masturbation are reasonably mainstream evangelical beliefs, but that her mainstream Republican beliefs ignore that the Bible says that fortunate, wealthy societies have an obligation to provide for the poor.

Originally I framed the article as we should be sensitive to her because the Bible says to be sensitive to those who are alone through no fault of their own like widows, orphans, and converts, but the Bible also says societies have the obligation to be generous to the poor. This obligation to sensitivity for widows, orphans, and converts seems to extend to be sensitive also to people who are involuntarily single, as virtually all religious single adults are, and abstinence must be a particularly difficult subject for her since abstinence means that she has an idealized view of marriage and her eventual husband she hoped would love her for her beliefs and admire her for having stuck to them since her conversion to become more religious. I liked the parallelism, but it involved too much speculation about her personal life.

More importantly, I'm not a religious authority, so it's not my place to say what we should and shouldn't do.

Two good comments so far on Baltimore Sun. One said how to you judge which beliefs you criticize candidates for. That's a really terrific topic --- many politicians have personal religious beliefs, but they maintain a line between those beliefs and the policies that they support. One example is Joe Lieberman where it's my understanding that his personal religious beliefs should in theory make him more supportive of social programs to help the poor, but lately he has been voting against these programs for what may be political reasons. A case where religious beliefs do influence policy for Christine O'Donnell is that she is clearly extremely anti-abortion and anti-choice --- she would ban abortion even for rape survivors --- and there's every reason to expect she would vote that way, and that's a great reason to vote against her, but that's from her policy statements, not from her religious beliefs. On the other hand, there are some distinguished politicians who have personal beliefs against abortion, and they themselves would not have abortions except under limited circumstances, who have strongly pro-choice voting records. It would be a great study to look at when what we know of candidates' personal religious beliefs agree with their voting records, and when their personal religious beliefs contrast with them. And perhaps this study has already been done. Any political scientists to comment?

Second comment calls for holding politicians accountable for making "rational evidence-based decisions," and oh my, I am so in agreement with that. Not making evidence-based decisions, and instead making decisions for reasons of politics, is extremely common in our government. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist and an expert in the Great Depression, and he's been writing op-eds for the past 2 years saying that we need to give more stimulus or unemployment is going to stay high for years and years, and we are going to lose a generation. And he's been saying the same theme over and over, and he's an extremely distinguished economist, a Nobel Prize winner, and not enough politicians listened to him to affect policy. And the failure to provide fiscal policy that can be adequate stimulus is the worst way that the government can fail people. We're talking about hurting young adults who happen to be coming of age now and during the next several years, and the effects of a worse job market when they come of age will affect them for their ENTIRE LIVES, and they will have not just lower earnings, but (judging by studies of past generations born in high unemployment eras) worse social problems. That's huge, and in my opinion way more important than abstinence education. But, yes, abstinence education is a shame, especially how $50 million abstinence-only funding came back in the health care reform bill in order to get it through Congress. And both of those issues are because of the 60 vote filibuster, and the fact that Senators no longer have to actually filibuster, they can just claim that they are. Some have said that if they actually had to speak for 24 hours straight, they would do it less. Again, the political scientists can speak.

Something we can all agree on: not sexualizing little girls

USC researchers have released a report on the role of women and girls on children's TV. The research finds that females are underrepresented, portrayed as primarily interested in appearance and romance, and that characters are sexualized. I was shocked to see how two children's TV characters were made over as sexualized. Both characters were originally little girls. Now they look older, thinner, show more skin, and Rainbow Brite especially looks like jail bait.

The right and left wings of the sex education debate don't agree on much, but they do agree that reducing women and girls to sexual and romantic roles is distasteful and inappropriate. I hope that all can find some constructive action to counter these disturbing trends.

Abstinence on prime time

Abstinence has made prime time a few times lately:

1. ABC's the Goode Family. Pilot episode: Daughter of liberal vegans thinks of taking a purity pledge. Even though everyone in the family agrees with the sentiment, they are completely wigged out by the trappings, such as the purity ball, purity ring given by father, etc., the fact that it's held in a church and done by primarily religious people. The father is an academic administrator and says he can't be seen in a church or he risks credibility at work.

Perhaps the most insightful message I've seen on abstinence in entertainment: everyone agrees on abstinence, but disagrees on style and how to talk about it: abstinence-only or abstinence-plus. Ultimately I wouldn't be surprised if the inclination to favor "abstinence only" or "plus" were one of the hard-wired political issues that the neuro- political science folks are picking up on brain scans. Teaching birth control feels wrong. So you end up with political stances like Sarah Palin's as governor being in favor of "Abstinence only" that of course teaches birth control. Just can't say the words "comprehensive" or even "abstinence plus" because those evoke the extremes. (Not to pick on conservatives. The opposite also holds: some start to think about the Taliban and "she was asking for it" rape when the issue of modest dress comes up, even if it's minimal standards that everyone adheres to in professional settings without thinking about. As soon as it's called "modesty" instead of "professionalism," the hard-wired instinct kicks in.)

The show is terrific otherwise as well. My favorite non-abstinence part was a fictional animal rights group called "Animals or Else!"

2. Little Mosque on the Prairie had an episode where the fiance of a woman who wears a hijab (headscarf) asks to see his fiancee's hair, but they decide to wait until marriage for him to see her hair. Very little tension throughout this non-touching relationship, but it's a sitcom with only 22 minutes to an episode, and that's not their focus so they don't have to be realistic. Still neat to see the prism of abstinence from a slightly different perspective. I wonder how many viewers without a cultural background that involves hair-covering have an intuitive feeling about this issue. How many think that it's no big deal to show her hair, versus how many feel shocked at the thought.

3. The Jonas Brothers on South Park: "Purity rings are how we sell sex to little girls."

An outrageous thought, and yet the qualitative research finds that until adolescents can conceive of physical intimacy, they have no conception of abstinence, so both abstinence and sex are foreign thoughts to their mind. Telling pre-sexual teens about abstinence is as much of a foreign idea as telling them about sex. Presumably the same holds for telling them about abstaining from drugs or alcohol before they are in a social world in which people take drugs or alcohol.

My neighbor taped it for me , but I haven't gotten down to watch it with him and only saw the 2 minute clip on youtube, so I don't know what else it has.

Oped in today's Baltimore Sun

Here's my oped from today's Baltimore Sun about the need for effective evidence-based sex education.

The editorial staff was really impressive in how much more easily they made the piece flow.

Media coverage of Pediatrics paper

I had my last media interview today, so here's the final list of coverage of the Pediatrics paper.


Professional Journals:
British Medical Journal
American Psychological Association Monitor: Coming

TV:
Today Show
(Columbus ABC TV - consulted)
[WJZ TV Baltimore]

Radio:
WABC New York: Curtis Sliwa Show
KFBK Sacramento.
Family News in Focus Radio
KGO AM San Francisco: ABC News
KPCC Air Talk.: 30 minute call-in show.
Colombia La FM Radio: largest radio station in Colombia
Newstalk Radio, Dublin
Fox News Radio: WINK Fort Meyers, KFAB Omaha, KCMO Kansas City, WGST Atlanta, KOGO San Diego
Doctors' Radio: 1 hour call-in show on xm/sirius satellite radio.
[CBS News Radio]
Indiana Public Radio: Sound Medicine: Coming 2/8/09.

Print:
Washington Post
Reuters
British Medical Journal
New Scientist
Bloomberg
Time Magazine
US News and World Report
Christianity Today
[USA Today]
Baptist Press

OpEds:
Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe
Kathryn Lopez, Washington Times
William McGurn, Wall Street Journal
Cheryl Wetzstein, Washington Times: She also mentions my advisor and collaborators' study.

Web: written or audio
CNN.com: Top 3 emailed article.
Huffington Post
Christian Post
Health.com: this is the original of what CNN used, but the CNN one got broader coverage.
Health Day
Health News
MedPageToday.com: with audio
Time Magazine Q and A
FoxNews.com
World Health News Today (video): coming?


Based on the abstract:
Medical News Today
Web MD

Waves of coverage

I don't know why I didn't notice the waves of coverage before, but it helps to be aware to have appropriate talking points for each wave.

1. Factual articles: motivation for paper, what it adds, main findings, conclusion, take-away point. Mostly in print media.

2. Reaction articles and 5-10 minutes radio interviews. Presumably people have already seen the factual articles in whole or part, so findings are presented briefly by someone else. They want to know findings in 1 sentence, take-away point in 1-2 sentences, why for each finding. Then they ask a bunch of questions well beyond the scope of your paper, and if you answered the questions as asked you would be speculating, so you need things to say that you are qualified to say related to their questions.

My favorite question from a radio interview, "Do couples who have sex have better relationships than couples who don't have sex?" I still don't know what I could have said.

Special interest press will pick out a tangential issue and expand on it so it seems like your study was about the background issue.

3. Call-in shows are like radio interviewers with more personal examples. The personal examples may line up exactly with your take-home points, which is extremely gratifying, or they may be interesting but something you only have anecdotal experience with.

4. Reactions to reactions: Party X raises objection Y. Talking point: One 20 word quote if it's a reasonable objection.


The hardest part, I find, is expanding the limits of what one can say. Medical journal papers are so extremely circumscribed, while press coverage asks about all kinds of issues that one could never justifiably publish in a medical journal without a whole separate study that one didn't do, so you just have to quote literature over and over.

Sending messages to kids

Only one radio station so far has really pushed this "if you teach birth control, kids get the wrong message" idea. In fact, over 90% of parents, and even Sarah Palin, say kids should learn birth control in schools. Afterwards I looked at their webpage, which has a button at the very top for a "Babes Page", and an ad immediately after this segment had a couple of adults making sexual innuendo before going to a home improvement store. What kind of message is that sending to kids?

I don't mean to be all "This is a feminist bookstore; we have no humor section.", but which one is more salacious: the Maxim Hot 100 or a condom demonstration in the style of an airline instructional video?

The officially religious contexts are at least consistent. The Southern Baptists have no Babes Page.


(Btw, an amusing Israeli one for the Hebrew speakers.)

Media interviews

1. Radio interviews are much more heuristic than press interviews and bckground interviews for TV. The press and TV actually do care exactly why your study is different from the others. The radio just wants you to give relevant 15 second quotes, so you end up talking about things that may have nothing to do with your study at all; they're just relevant to what the radio interviewer is thinking about. In every radio interview I find myself saying that parents need to talk about sex with their kids, which is pretty much what everyone says in response to this type of study.

And on the late night talk radio, I got to mention that graham crackers were invented to prevent masturbation. The host was upset. He eats them every day.

Average length of a press interview: 25 minutes. One of the best press interviews was 17 minutes with the New Scientist in London; I was impressed how efficiently he got the information compared with the other press who were about 10 minutes longer.

Radio interviews are at most 5 minutes. Very convenient that they are after the press interviews, so the press talking points can be narrowed down.

I have my first TV interview tomorrow, and then another next week.

2. It's hard to come up with good quotes just from talking. I wrote down the technical parts so that I could describe it accurately in an easy to understand way, but I left non-technical parts to ad lib. I didn't remember that it was even more important to write down my conclusions in an easy quote until the articles came out. My quotes in the Washington Post interview were very weak, and they would have been stronger if I had written out the quotes I wanted to appear in print in advance. The process of going from oral to writing is hard.

E.g., the following is the kind of thing I wish I had said in one sentence: "Parents should teach their kids how to use condoms. It doesn't cause them to have sex any earlier, but it could save their future health and fertility." But this type of sentence doesn't come out of your mouth so concisely if you're speaking off the cuff. At least, it doesn't come out of my mouth.

3. The news cycle goes so fast. I was in transit between Chicago and Baltimore from 7 am until 2 pm, and people weren't calling my cell phone (though they had before), so I missed USA Today, CBS Radio (national or DC, not sure), and possibly another.

Criticism of my pledge study

A blogger called Outside the Beltway writes about the validity of the study, and unleashes an intelligent barrage of comments from his readers about the methodology because he assumed I was doing standard regression analysis instead of matching. It's amazing how many methodological details people are able to pull from the media reports, and it's neat to see a political argument turn into a discussion of internal validity. I'm curious whether the phrase "parametric assumptions" will appear.

A few people --- Investors Business Daily and Valerie Huber cited at the end of the Post article --- have made accusations of ideological bias, which is a particularly ridiculous accusation to make about a statistician. If studies were determined by ideological bias, statistics would suddenly become much easier, and entire subfields of statistics such as procedures to adjust for multiple comparisons could disappear.

Ideological bias is also funny to raise about me, in particular. I vote straight blue and am firmly pro-choice, but I'm also frustratingly moderate. In discussions with reproductive health researchers, I stick up for the abstinence folks whenever it's warranted, and I read evangelical sex and dating books to the point that I know these better than some evangelical clergy, and I've even recommended evangelical dating books to friends.

The IBD editorial is particularly funny because it refers to the "fat wallet" of Mayor Bloomberg as having financed my study, which was not financed at all beyond the grants that paid for my PhD education, and then it links my study to the psilocybin study at Bayview, and repeats the same fallacy correlating teen pregnancy decline with rise of abstinence-only education.

They do get in a good line, "Abstinence-ed can't work as a one-night stand."

Apparently I can speak Italian!

Someone sent me myself in Italian, but somehow the link got deleted. I'll add it back.
an article that quotes me as saying, "Sembra che l'astinenza debba derivare da una convinzione personale piuttosto che dall'adesione a un programma." Exactly.


Here's more coverage:
WebMD: I had a really enjoyable interview with them in 2006 and they wrote a great article. This article is just based on the paper's abstract.


This blog is wrong: pledgers and non-pledgers have anal sex at the same rates. I bet the writer just wanted to include the phrase "unprotected anal sex" and quote Dan Savage's column from this week. I don't blame him. It was a funny column.

hr



Here's the rundown of what I've seen so far.

My favorite so far is a note from a virginity pledger which amazingly says what I speculated about in some interviews today:

As a 28-year-old Christian, I made my pledge more than 10 years ago, but that didn't stop my mother from educating me about sex (of all kinds) condoms and what happens when the "hose meets the flower" (she was a lot less delicate about it -- but I won't say what she actually said in print). I don't even think that she expected me to stay a virgin this long (she actually supports a little sexual experimentation before I marry), but the decision was mine from the beginning -- and the decision has to be your teen's as well. If you pressure them to make a decision that they are not ready for -- they won't keep it, they will lie to you about their activity and then you might be wondering why a bundle of joy is calling you Grandma.

Reflections on my study from a parent: conclusion: advocate abstinence, teach birth control, and try to keep open communication. Right on!

Health.com: she asked really good and thorough questions, and so far, this is the most thorough article. I'm glad that it worked out because I was interviewed in the car on the way from Indiana to Chicago, and I found the corn fields slightly distracting.

One blog post on the study is interesting, and I want to think about it.

Virginity pledges portray premarital sex as a sin. We tend to sneak around or be impulsive about things that make us feel guilty. We tend to take more reasonable approaches to things that don’t make us feel guilty.

What this study didn’t control for (and what I don’t think can be controlled for) is whether or not the pledge takers would have approached premarital sex with a high level of guilt and the same aversion to birth control even if they hadn’t take a pledge. What comes first? The view that premarital sex is a sin? Or the pledge?

The reasoning about not using birth control because of guilt is entirely the blog poster's. I didn't look at that. I am inclined to say that guilt isn't the intermediate variable, and instead having been taught inaccurate information about birth control, but it's an interesting question.


The big report was, of course, the Washington Post's and the

The Today Show really impressed me because they were able to cover the study so succinctly in the 5 minute segment. I know it was a written script and the psychologist wasn't improvising her answers on the spot, so that's why it could go so quickly, but it was still impressive that they fit so many details in.

One report referred to "The Rosenbaum study" and "Her team’s conclusions". The UK Daily Mail calls me "Miss Rosenbaum" and it's also slightly inaccurate: it's 15-18 year olds; no 14 year olds in my study.


Dan Savage quotes someone named Atrioson my study.

While the fact that virginity pledges and abstinence-only sex "ed" don't stop teens from having sex is unsurprising, I doubt that even proponents are particularly surprised. They aren't interested in abstinence, really, they're interested in making sure "bad girls" get punished for having sex by being subject to the appropriate consequences. So it actually works as designed.

I've read Dan Savage's column since I was in high school, and I often agree on his sex advice. On this count, I completely disagree with Atrios. The virginity pledge was an attempt by adults to make abstinence cool. I've not seen any evidence that anyone wants to demonize anyone else. Incidentally, from a health standpoint, it makes sense to focus more on girls: they are more vulnerable to STDs.

Health Day: part of ABC news?.

Bloomberg

One article describes me as "the researcher in charge of the study". We're a pretty small operation here: me and my computer.

One article has the baffling headline "Teenage self discipline as effective as promiscuity".

Okay, that's enough for now. Somewhat disorganized.

Today's media requests

I'll post links from what was published today later, but for now:

- Reuters
- ABC TV in Columbus, OH: referrals to local experts. Take bets on whether they choose the statistician or the pediatrician.
- Sacramento radio KFBK: wanted me to go on this morning 2 hours after their call, but I was on a plane.
- Time magazine: Online Q and A to be published tomorrow.
- USA Today
- Family News in Focus
- Ellen Goodman
- WJZ TV Baltimore scheduled interview
- World Health News Today: will schedule interview


Ellen Goodman asked great questions, and was particularly interested by the phenomenon of "forgetting" the pledge, though she asked lots of questions.

USA Today had an immediate deadline for this morning, while I was on a plane, but perhaps later.

Whoa, this is me!

Catching up on my Google emails of all mentions of the word abstinence to me, I ran across a virginity pledge study that I'd not heard of. When I read the article, I realized it was about my work.

Two local TV stations covered my APHA presentation, and broadcast stories the next day Springfield, Missouri and Bakersfield, CA. And thankfully, that's it.

I wonder how that happened. Both are ABC news, so I guess ABC news wrote the story and sent it to affiliate stations and these were the only ones who chose to publish/broadcast it.

New virginity pledge research?

I spoke with Time magazine today about virginity pledges. They asked me to summarize my past research, whether virginity pledges decrease sex, affect STDs, or affect the behaviors that adolescents engage in (e.g., substituting oral or anal sex), and for my assessment of the past studies published by Bearman and Brueckner, and also about the unpublished research of Rector. I have a paper on the subject under review, which I mentioned, but I wasn't sure what I could say about it.

She asked for the scientific consensus about virginity pledges and their effect on STDs and perhaps she later asked other outcomes, and these were hard questions to answer. Partly because in many cases there's only one relevant published study, and partly because my research touches on it but I can't talk about my research yet.

Speaking without a set agenda was surprisingly difficult. That is, I could answer her questions easily and I know that I gave valuable background information, but I didn't know whether I was giving her the quotes she needed. I didn't have well-prepared "take home messages" unfortunately.

I was happy that so many questions were easy to answer. E.g., the research which is not peer reviewed is not subject to the same scrutiny as all the other work out there. That was much easier to say than giving my off-the-cuff assessment of the research from my memory of it, especially since my only real comment about it is that I recalled there being more potential for multiple-comparison problems than other similar research, and that's not only speculative, but I have the feeling it's unprintable due to being boring.

Something which I'd never noticed before about journalists was how open-ended her questions were, such as what does it mean about virginity pledges that studies have found that pledgers and non-pledgers have similar STD risks. She asked very specific questions, breaking up the different effects that virginity pledges might have: what's the effect on X, and then later asked about Y. She also asked a few very open questions which allow speculation into how pledgers were thinking, where the answer of course has to be that we don't know what they're thinking, but there's always temptation to veer into speculative territory.

I did underline the seminal nature of the Mathematica Policy Research report on abstinence-only education, and that it was Congressionally-mandated. It sounded like this paper hadn't been part of their research prior to my mentioning it.




I wonder what event brought about this reexamination of virginity pledges, whether it was just the Congressional hearings at the end of April, or whether something else has happened. Something I just noticed is that Heritage's review of past abstinence education studies was released at the same time as the hearings, so there was no time to scrutinize it before the hearing. By contrast, the Cochrane review was published in late 2007, well before the late April hearings.