Substantial Vows, Suspicious Scholarship

Distressed at the sexual permissiveness of modern American culture, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church decided to launch a virginity pledge movement in 1993, challenging young people to make a formal vow to abstain from pre-marital sexual activity. Because of that movement, a remarkably large number of American adolescents (23% of females and 16% of males) have in the intervening years taken such a formal virginity pledge. The effects of this movement are naturally showing up in America’s institutions of higher learning, with a recent survey of American college students finding that approximately one in six (16%) had taken a formal virginity pledge. Given all of the good that can come out of a rediscovery of chastity (fewer out-of-wedlock pregnancies, fewer cases of sexually transmitted diseases, more psychologically healthy adolescents and young adults), social scientists have good reason to regard the virginity-pledge movement as a very good thing. However, in a study recently published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation strain very hard—no doubt for ideological reasons—to view the success of the virginity-pledge movement in an astonishingly negative light!

Drawing on data collected over three years from 870 adolescents living in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, the scholars look closely to identify those social, personal, and family characteristics that predict delayed sexual activity. Not surprisingly, adolescents are particularly likely to delay sexual activity if they come from religious families, if they have parents who disapprove of such activity, if they have friends who disapprove of such activity, if they believe that such activity will endanger their health, or if they believe that such activity will jeopardize their psychosocial well-being (p<0.01 for all five variables for both sexual intercourse and oral sex).

Likewise unsurprising are data showing that adolescents are distinctively less likely to engage in sexual activity if they have taken a formal virginity pledge (p<0.05 for sexual intercourse; p<0.01 for oral sex). The researchers further establish that adolescents are especially likely to remain sexually continent if they have made a private pledge of virginity, even when that private pledge is not accompanied by a formal public pledge—an important finding given that only a quarter (23%) of private pledgers have made a public pledge). Compared to peers who have made no such private pledge, adolescents who have made a private pledge to delay sexual activity are less than half as likely to engage in sexual intercourse  (Odds Ratio of .43). This effect “persisted even [in statistical models] controlling for demographic and social variables” such as race, age, and other background characteristics.

“Adolescents who made a formal public pledge to wait until marriage to have sexual intercourse and/or made a [private] promise to wait until they were older or married to have sexual intercourse were less likely to have participated in oral sex and vaginal intercourse,” the Pacific scholars acknowledge, “than adolescents who hadn’t participated in a formal or non-formal [private] pledge.”   But for some reason, the researchers emphasize statistics showing that a formal virginity pledge does not affect sexual behavior if it is not accompanied by a private pledge. 

It will not puzzle anyone that the researchers can see no distinctive self-restraint among those few adolescents who make a formal public virginity pledge without also making a private pledge. No one has ever expected much good to come out of dissembling. But given that the researchers’ data show that “ninety-five percent of adolescents who had made a formal [virginity] pledge had also made a private pledge,” the virginity-pledge movement is almost entirely a thing of real substance, not of feigned words.

Since the new study clearly identifies real private conviction in nineteen out of twenty adolescents who have made a formal and public virginity pledge, it may seem more than a little strange that the authors of the study focus on the very few adolescents (only one in twenty) who make a public virginity pledge without private substance and whose subsequent sexual behavior is indistinguishable from that of peers who have made no such pledge. But it is only this peculiar focus that can account for the researchers’ overblown worries about how “formal pledges may...fail if adolescents are simply responding to external pressures (i.e., from parents, teachers) in making such commitments.” Only such a peculiar focus can explain a conclusion in which the Pacific researchers warn that “the results of this study suggest that prevention programs that rely solely or even heavily on formal public virginity pledges may not be as effective as previously believed.”

Given that formal virginity pledges appear quite efficacious except among the very few (five percent!) who take them without heartfelt private commitment, such negative commentary seems entirely unwarranted. This negative commentary appears to owe almost nothing to the available empirical data and almost everything to an ideological bias—common among progressive scholars—against anything even remotely tied to conservative religious faith.

Indeed, the same ideological bias that prompts the Pacific scholars to work so very hard to discredit formal vows of virginity is probably the reason that the researchers report with very little comment or emphasis a finding that is very damaging to a cause much more popular among progressive intellectuals than anything coming from Southern Baptists, namely, the cause of contraceptive education. In parsing the data, the researchers concede that “a positive association emerged between all three sexual behaviors [genital play, oral sex, and sexual intercourse]...and formal contraceptive education.” Indeed, the researchers admit that “adolescents who received information on condoms were twice as likely to have participated in genital play, oral sex, and vaginal intercourse as those who had not received formal contraceptive education.” (The researchers—probably chagrined by their findings—are eager to point out that, though persistent, the linkage between formal contraceptive education and heightened levels of sexual activity does not cross the threshold of statistical significance in multi-variable analyses that account for various social and psychological characteristics, including parents’ attitudes toward teen sexual activity.)

The choice could hardly be clearer: Americans can either entrust their adolescent offspring to those who will teach them about pledges of virginity or they can entrust them to those who will instruct them in the mechanics of contraception. The outcomes in the lives of the young people affected will be dramatically different.

(Source: Melina M. Bersamin et al., “Promising to wait: virginity pledges and adolescent sexual behavior,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36 [2005]: 428-436, emphasis added.)

Long-Term Blues  

Seeing parents divorce and remarry may send boys spiraling downward into a lifetime of mental distress.  The dark consequences of parental divorce and remarriage stand out as one of the findings of a study recently published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology by a team of researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC).

Parsing psychological data collected over ten years for 206 boys originally contacted between 1983 and 1985, the OSLC tracks the patterns of depressive symptoms as these boys passed through adolescence and young adulthood.  As they seek to identify the “early predictors” of their psychological trajectories, the OSLC scholars underscore the importance of “parental transitions” (that is, of “changes in parental figures” of the sort typically caused by divorce and remarriage).   Compared to young men who had experienced no parental transition (because their parents had stayed in a first marriage), young men who had experienced such parental transitions were especially likely to manifest a high level of depression that persisted throughout the study period (p<0.01).  “Parental transitions,” the researchers acknowledge, “uniquely discriminated the high-persistent [depression] group” from all the other groups in the study.  The data indeed indicate that “the more [such] transitions, the higher the probability of membership in the high-persistent [depression] group.”

Quite plausibly, the authors of the new study anticipate a dark future for “the high-persistent [depression] group” of young men, drawn disproportionately from the ranks of those who have seen their parents divorce.  Noting that young men in this group were “still at an elevated level of depressive symptoms at age 24,” the researchers note the very real possibility of “a lifetime diagnosis of depression.”

It would appear that our culture of easy divorce is producing far too many hard lives.

(Source: Mike Stoolmiller, Hyoun K. Kim, and Deborah M. Capaldi, “The Course of Depressive Symptoms in Men from Early Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Identifying Latent Trajectories and Early Predictors,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 114 [2005]: 331-345.)

Is This Legislation Necessary?  

Does federal legislation that aims to combat domestic violence help women or the interest groups that claim to be helping women? While the group think of the nation’s capital would not dare ponder the question, two social work professors at Florida State found that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—which was reauthorized by President Bush early this year—failed to exert an independent effect on three of four measures of domestic violence since Congress first passed the law in 1994.

The researchers first plotted the domestic violence rate as estimated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 1992 to 2003. Then using data from a sample of 2,368 female victims of domestic violence drawn from the National Crime Victimization Survey during the same period, they calculated rates of police notification, rates of arrest, and rates of victim contact with other authorities. While the domestic violence rate declined during the period, the other three rates increased somewhat—although the rates of arrest increased dramatically.

Then using an “interrupted time series design,” the professors measured the impact of the 1994 legislation on the four trend lines by separating the data prior to the fourth quarter of 1994 into a control group and the data after the quarter into a treatment group. Contrary to their expectations, the passage of VAWA yielded a statistically significant impact on only one of the four variables, increasing the rate of victim contact with other authorities by 5.5 percent (p<.05). These results were confirmed in two additional time tests that weighed the possibility of delayed effects of the legislation. The researchers theorize that the limited impact of VAWA might be due to the possibility that existing trends in domestic violence were already in place prior to 1994.

While the professors don’t make the observation, their descriptive statistics—showing that victims in their sample were less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced or separated—suggest that attempts to reverse the retreat from marriage might be a more effective depressant on domestic violence in America.

(Source: Hyunkag Cho and Dina J. Wilke, “How Has the Violence Against Women Act Affected the Response of the Criminal Justice System to Domestic Violence?” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 32 [December 2005]: 125-139.)

Bank On It!  

Social Capital has emerged as central to various sociological explanations of group and individual well-being.  Public health scholar Anna M. Ziersch invokes this concept in a recent investigation of physical and mental health of Australians.  Defining social capital as both the “infrastructure...[of] networks and values” that gives individuals access to resources and the resources obtained through these networks and values, Ziersch finds her measures of that capital very helpful in predicting mental health, but far less helpful in predicting physical health.  And in looking at “the elements of S[ocial] C[apital] I[nfrastructure that] can potentially lead to S[ocial] C[apital] R[esource]s, which are in turn health promoting,” it is that basic social link of marriage that keeps turning up as decisive.

Scrutinizing data collected from approximately 2500 residents living in suburban Adelaide, Ziersch concludes that marital status was “positively indirectly associated” with “informal networks,” with married individuals more frequently “socializing with friends, family, neighbours, and work colleagues” than unmarried peers. 

The relatively strong informal networks enjoyed by married men and women may, in turn, help account for the fact that, compared to the unmarried, the married individuals in this study acknowledged receiving significantly more “practical support” (such as loans of tools or exchanges of favors) and significantly more “emotional and financial support.” 

Among the Australians involved in this study, being married also predicted a stronger sense of being “in control of life in general,” with the statistical model identifying marital status as a variable that was “positively indirectly associated” with sense of control. 

Given the advantages they enjoyed in informal networks, in practical and emotional assistance, and in control over their lives, it is hardly surprising that Ziersch reports that the married men and women in this study felt “the most advantaged” in their “achievements in life,” in their “quality of life,” and in their “future and spare time,” while those who had never married or who were divorced or separated felt “the least [advantaged].” 

Likewise unsurprising is Ziersch’s finding that “marital status was indirectly positively associated with mental health, with those married/de facto having the best mental health and those never married or separated/divorced the worst.”

Ziersch concludes her study by identifying social capital as “part of the jigsaw puzzle of health inequities” and by calling for “strategies that will help the poor, in particular, to develop a ‘portfolio of resources,’ linking them into a range of resource-rich ties.”

It would appear that one of the resource-rich ties that matter most—in Adelaide or in Atlanta—is the one defined by wedlock.

(Source: Anna M Ziersch, “Health implications of access to social capital: findings from an Australian study,” Social Science & Medicine 61 [2005]: 2119-2131.)  

Better Than a Hot-Line  

Because the number of young adults committing suicide has shot up in recent decades, public-health officials have cast about desperately for ways to reverse this distressing trend.  These officials have consequently invested considerable effort and money in establishing suicide hot-lines to give life-saving psychological support to those teetering on the edge.  However, a new study published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior suggests the best way to prevent self-slaughter among the young is not to multiply such hot-lines, but rather to re-establish a wedlock-supporting culture that will guide young Americans toward rather than away from the altar.

Coming from the University of Chicago, the American College Health Association, and the Columbia Counseling Center, the authors of the new study very much recognize the urgency of the issue they address.  Because the incidence of suicide rose sharply among adolescents and young adults between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, mortality statistics now indicate that “suicide is the third leading cause of death among the U.S. college-aged population (18-24 years of age).” 

To identify the circumstances that push so many college-aged Americans over the brink, the researchers carefully examine data collected during the academic year 1999-2000 from 15,977 college students.  Those data indicate that almost one in ten (9.5%) of the students in the study had “seriously considered attempting suicide” during the past year and that about one in seventy (1.5%) had actually attempted suicide during that period. 

The data permit the researchers to identify “risk factors” implicated in suicidal thoughts.  Being in “an emotionally abusive relationship” almost triples the likelihood that a young person will seriously contemplate suicide (Odds Ratio of 2.9).  And, despite all of the on-campus support for sexual diversity, the researchers calculate that “those who report being gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual have an odds ratio 2.6 times higher [than heterosexuals] for seriously considering suicide.”  Though the researchers do not track students into their post-college life, they suggest that the data indicate “a degree of jeopardy unlikely to be transitory.”

When the researchers shift their attention to “protective factors,” one social tie leaps into prominence.  “The single most protective factor,” the researchers remark, “was being married.”  Compared to single peers, married college students were almost 30% less likely to seriously contemplate suicide (Odds Ratio of .721).      

Curiously, in a conclusion that outlines ways university and public health officials can work together “to achieve [their] prevention goals,” the authors of the study say not one word about fostering a culture supportive of wedlock.

(Source: Jeremy Kisch, Victor Leino, and Morton M. Silverman, “Aspects of Suicidal Behavior, Depression, and Treatment in College Students: Results from the Spring 2000 National College Health Assessment Survey,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 35.1 [2005]: 3-13.)  

Sobered into Parenthood  

America’s retreat from family life has been hastened by a culture of sit-com silliness and self-help formulae.  Surrounded by such distractions, some Americans have recovered the moral gravity necessary to sustain family ties only when touched by tragedy.   In April 1995, such tragedy struck Oklahoma City when a deranged extremist attacked a federal office building, killing 168 people, including 19 preschool-age children.  Shaken into a reassessment of their life priorities, many area residents decided in the months and years following the tragedy to commit themselves to the responsibilities of parenthood.

The linkage between the Oklahoma City bombing and a subsequent regional surge in fertility was recently documented by a team of sociologists and psychologists at the University of Oklahoma. Carefully examining data for Oklahoma County and the surrounding counties, the Oklahoma researchers limn “one strong, consistent result” in both their statistical modeling and their graphical analysis: “Oklahoma County, in particular, and the counties around Oklahoma City, to a lesser extent, had increased births” for 1996 through 1999.  In this “interpretable, consistent, and significant increase in births,” the Oklahoma scholars see “the response of those who feel a vivid threat to their own mortality and who respond with a strengthening of their traditional values.”  Indeed, the authors of this new study see in this surge in area fertility the same kind of “community response” traced by the authors of a 2004 study showing “a reduction in divorces immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing.”

How many Americans in Maine or Nevada or Georgia can join Oklahomans in rediscovering the preciousness of family ties without passing through the kind of nightmare visited on the Sooner State?

(Source: Joseph Lee Rodgers, Craig A. St. John, and Ronnie Coleman, “Did Fertility Go Up After the Oklahoma City Bombing? An Analysis of Births in Metropolitan Counties in Oklahoma, 1990-1999,” Demography 42 [2005]: 675-692.)