Monday, November 3, 2008

TV and Teen Pregnancy

There's a new study out linking teen pregnancy to watching TV. Over a certain number of hours of TV watching the rate of pregnancies doubled:
The RAND Corp. study is the first of its kind to identify a link between teenagers’ exposure to sexual content on TV and teen pregnancies. The study, released Monday and published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that teens exposed to high levels of sexual content on television were twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy in the following three years as teens with limited exposure.
It looks like they added up the number of hours watched then matched it to teen pregnancy rates and decided there is too much sex on TV.

This is absurd, all they have done is show the two happen at the same time, not that one caused the other. Maybe pregnancy causes more TV watching? Maybe they aren't even watching the shows with lots of sex on it.

I think both are symptoms that result from stupid teens (lets face it some just aren't too bright), uneducated teens (abstinence only sex ed), and lack of parental involvement.

But then, I'm just using my own biases to reach a conclusion, just like the study did.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Something tells me this still won't inspire HBO to produce a show called "Abstinence in the City".