posted
actually.. of that 5%.. I wonder how many are gay... or got married at a very young age. (young enough that the temptation+opportunity for premartial sex just wasn't there)
My previous snarky comment aside, it looks like they're saying only heterosexual sex counts for the purposes of their study.
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posted
I would imagine that that's exactly what they're saying, given they used 'sex' to mean 'vaginal intercourse'. Which, as Dag mentioned, implicitly also requires a penis.
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posted
Either that or they don't believe that homosexuals are actual Residents of the United States.
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posted
I just saw Beavis and Butt-head Do America on DVD in a store for less than CDN$10. I thought about buying it.
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quote: it looks like they're saying only heterosexual sex counts for the purposes of their study.
So... are you saying most lesbians/gays have never experienced heterosexual sex? Most of the ones I have talked with or read about, at some time in their life "tried" it the other way, at least once. Or were bi. So I don't think this is excluding as many as you would think..
posted
Most.. mm... I dunno.. I've known plenty of Gold Star lesbians. But yes, a goodly number of otherwise exclusively gay people need time to figure it out.
But there's also the issue of young people getting married. My lil brother got married at 19. When I was 19, for the purposes of this study, I had never had pre-martial sex. If I had gotten married at that age, I would have qualified for the 5%.
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quote:Originally posted by twinky: I think it does, unless you're using "premarital" to denote "nonmarital" (and include "extramarital").
And this was how I was hearing it on the news this morning. That the study showed 95% of all adult Americans had had sex outside of marriage. Now, it could be that the deejay or reporter or whoever reading the story misread it, or maybe they were reading a script that had been paraphrased, but that's what I originally got. 95% having had sex outside of the bounds of marriage I can certainly contemplate. 95% having had specifically premarital sex? not so easy to digest.
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quote:Originally posted by twinky: I think it does, unless you're using "premarital" to denote "nonmarital" (and include "extramarital").
And this was how I was hearing it on the news this morning. That the study showed 95% of all adult Americans had had sex outside of marriage. Now, it could be that the deejay or reporter or whoever reading the story misread it, or maybe they were reading a script that had been paraphrased, but that's what I originally got. 95% having had sex outside of the bounds of marriage I can certainly contemplate. 95% having had specifically premarital sex? not so easy to digest.
Wait, by saying "sex outside the bounds of marriage," does that include extramarital sex, i.e. affairs? If that's the case, wouldn't that be worse than sex before marriage?
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posted
I have a hard time believing that all of the respondents understood the question in the same way.
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posted
I'm in the middle of making latkes (*rubs belly*), so I can't look at the study; but Lyr has a good point. Does anyone know how the sampling was done? I'd love it if Bob could come in and give us his take on the methods used.
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posted
One problem with this study is that it considers sexual experience as a binary yes or no value.
Just knowing a person has had premarital sex tells you next to nothing about how generally chaste he or she is.
For example, all these four people would count as a yes:
A) A shy and awkward 16 year old has fumbling sex once with another teen, but never has sex again the rest of his or her life due to extreme shyness.
B) Someone has sex once at 18, but then waits until finding Mr/Mrs Right at age 25 to have sex again (after the ceremony).
C) A 21 year old has sex for the first time, finds he or she likes it, and so spends the next 20 years getting a different partner in bed nearly every night.
D) A 30 year old virgin meets the love of his or her life, gets engaged, has sex with his or her fiance, and after marriage remains 100% faithful.
Drawing a conclusion from this study that people should just forget about encouraging abstinence because 95% do it anyway is a bit premature.
Persons B and D in my example may well have been much more chaste because they were influenced by the ideal of abstinence, even if they didn't meet it 100%.
How many people in the study fell into these categories of sexual frequency? We have no idea. And that really limits how useful the study is.
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quote:Originally posted by Dav: Drawing a conclusion from this study that people should just forget about encouraging abstinence because 95% do it anyway is a bit premature.
Why should we encourage abstinence in the first place???
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quote:Originally posted by Dav: Drawing a conclusion from this study that people should just forget about encouraging abstinence because 95% do it anyway is a bit premature.
Why should we encourage abstinence in the first place???
Because sex outside wedlock "destroys society."
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posted
As much as I disagree with abstinence-only education, I don't actually think this particular study discredits it. (I am assuming here that the purpose of such education is to discourage premarital sex.) If the study used a really representative population, then it should have included a very large majority who did not receive abstinence-only education; therefore, it is not yet shown that people will have lots of premarital sex in spite of such education. If you limited the study to people who did receive such education, then you could discredit it. In fact, I think that's been done. But this particular study does not show that abstinence-only fails at its intended purpose.
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posted
In case anyone misunderstands my previous post, I'm not personally in favor of an "abstinence-only" sex-ed policy. I think it's important for people to understand birth control and prophylactics, as well as abstinence.
My point is that the study says almost nothing about how effective or ineffective encouraging abstinence is at changing sexual behavior. And yet, many people seem to be drawing conclusions from it about exactly that.
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posted
This band-wagoning is so typical of the Left, the minority masquerading as a majority with the 'facts' to back it up.
It reminds me of those who point to the dissolution of half of all marriages as proof that marriage is a dated concept, until you look at those who are divorced getting remarried at double the rate of the single. Clearly marriage is not out to those who have experienced it, they are just learning from mistakes and finding opportunities and people that are better suited to them. Divorce making stronger marriges...
I personally have nothing against premarital sex, a person is either trained or untrained, a seventeen year old in a car wreck is paralyzed by shock, an eighteen year old soldier calls in a precise nine line medivac after an attack, the difference is training. I think it is sad that we idealize two fumbling klutzes trying to make the fireworks happen, I think if everyone has the basic skills then performance is more of an indication of true vocation then mere skill. If I had their numbers I would call the guys my wife practiced on and thank them for the finished product I received.
But that is me...
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quote:Originally posted by General Sax: This band-wagoning is so typical of the Left, the minority masquerading as a majority with the 'facts' to back it up.
Yeah, damn those pesky "statistics" and "studies." Who needs 'em?
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posted
What this reminds me of is the poll that showed 90% of all teens masturbate, and 10% lie when polled...
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quote: I think if everyone has the basic skills then performance is more of an indication of true vocation then mere skill. If I had their numbers I would call the guys my wife practiced on and thank them for the finished product I received.
I would like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Did they poll the people about anything other than their location and gender? Did they ask them their religious views? Just curious, because those things I think would skew the finale results.
Here's what the webpage for the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) says:
quote:How Was I Chosen? We do not know who lives at your house or what your name is. We take a sample of households from all across the United States. When your interviewer arrives, she will find out if there is someone in your household we need to include in our study.
Why Should I Take Part? Why Not Interview Across the Street? We cannot talk to all of the millions of men and women in this country — that would cost too much and take too long. So we scientifically select a “sample” of households. We then choose one person from some of those households to be in the survey. Choosing the sample scientifically lets us take the information we learn and use it to better understand the whole population. Once participants have been chosen they cannot be replaced.
As far as how well a scientific sample of 12,500 people can predict behavior of a population, this sample size calculator says that you can achieve 99% confidence in an approx range of 94-96%.
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posted
So, I'm guessing all they have is age, gender and location.
Honestly, I don't think that's enough information for this topic. I'm most curious to find out the religion of these people. What if all 40,000 or whatever were atheists? What if they were all Catholic? Some mix? Other religions? How seriously did they practice (religion, not the other thing)?
Further, that number is almost useless in getting us anywhere. If the poll was done to have any effect what so ever on sex education in this country, they left off a ton of questions that would be necessary, like what sort of sex education the people being questioned actually recieved. We have no idea if they recieved extensive education and went on to have sex, or limited abstinence only and then went on to have sex, or what the 5% got.
I know that statistically, cross sections and random sampling actually comes closer than not to the truth, but to learn anything of value, other than a number that can be used by pretty much anyone to justify any of their points about sex, a lot more questions needed to be asked in this poll.
Sax -
I love how you attacked a statistic by using another statistic to fend it off with. I'm not even sure how this is a "left" issue any more than a "right" issue. But I suppose your left smearing was supposed to be self-explanatory.
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posted
I don't buy the whole 95% deal. Maybe it's just because I hang out in Christian circles, but There are a whole lot of people that, if they are not lying, have waited until marraige.
Also, it's not that more people are having pre-marital sex, it's that more people are admitting to it.
These are things people have probably already said, but I won't read the posts, Because I want to go to be... Hey! That rhymes.
For the record, I do believe that if the statistics are true, 95% people have made at least one major mistake in their lives. But, what people do is their business. One of my friends lost her virginity at 13/14. It happens. I, on the other hand, am still abstinate and I'm planning on remaining that way until I'm married.
<steps off of soap-box>
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to snooze.
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quote:Maybe it's just because I hang out in Christian circles, but There are a whole lot of people that, if they are not lying, have waited until marraige.
quote:Originally posted by Nathan2006: For the record, I do believe that if the statistics are true, 95% people have made at least one major mistake in their lives. But, what people do is their business. One of my friends lost her virginity at 13/14. It happens. I, on the other hand, am still abstinate and I'm planning on remaining that way until I'm married.
Not everyone who has premarital sex loses his/her virginity at a very young age. And not everyone who has premarital sex is promiscuous or careless.
Edit: Also, if you think only 95% of the population has made at least one major life mistake, then I'm pretty sure you're seriously mistaken.
quote: quote:Maybe it's just because I hang out in Christian circles, but There are a whole lot of people that, if they are not lying, have waited until marraige.
Agreed. [Smile]
Agreed. In my youth, I hung out in mostly Christian circles and as I got older, learned that many if not most of them were lying. Or at least misrepresenting themselves. Imagine my disillusionment when I found out what exactly passed for "chaste", "pure", and "virginal".
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posted
Lyr, If you draw randomly from a population that has characteristics in some distribution, then, as your sample size increases, you become more and more likely to approach the true distribution in your sample, assuming that you have no selection bias. That is to say, it is possible that this sampling yielded a slice of the population with much different aspects from the general population, but it is very, very, very unlikely unless there was some sort of strong selection/response bias.
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posted
Nathan, I think you may run into definitional problems there, as many people consider a mistake to be something that someone does that negatively affects their lives that they often come to regret, as opposed to something that you, yourself, don't approve of.
posted
Like Frisco, I knew a whole bunch of people who claimed to be horrified by the very idea of pre-marital sex in public...but participated in quite a bit of it in spite of that. Then, too, there's the "everything but" crowd, though I suppose by the definitions of the survey, they'd fall into the 5%.
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quote:Maybe it's just because I hang out in Christian circles, but There are a whole lot of people that, if they are not lying, have waited until marraige.
Roughly 5%, I'd say. And it's certainly been my experience that most of the people I know -- religious and not -- who claim to have "waited" until marriage were, by the age of 25 or so, lying about it. There are always exceptions, but they're just that: exceptional.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: Nathan, I think you may run into definitional problems there, as many people consider a mistake to be something that someone does that negatively affects their lives that they often come to regret, as opposed to something that you, yourself, don't approve of.
Squicky, you may be having a definitional problem of your own. Many people consider a mistake to be a "a wrong action attributable to bad judgment or ignorance or inattention."
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posted
I'm with everyone who is surprised by the 5% number. I'm certainly having premarital sex, but in my circles, I'm the exception rather than the rule. And I don't run in Christian circles, although some of my friends are Christian. Also, I seriously doubt anyone is lying to me.
However, I know very few people over the age of 21, so maybe all of my friends who aren't having premarital sex now are going to start before 44.
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posted
At 33, I don't know anyone (outside of the forums) who claims to be a virgin. Obviously, I know people with whom the subject hasn't come up. I know people who have had sex before and stopped because they now believe non-marital sex is wrong, and I know people who have non-marital sex and feel guilty about it and try not to for awhile but then start again. So I have no problem believing the numbers. I know there are people who believe it is important and stick to their convictions. . . and 5% sounds about right for that to me.
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posted
What happens to respondants who refuse to take part in the survey? The quote from Nato says once participants are chosen they cannot be replaced, but I imagine they were not able to get responses from all the chosen interviewees. If so, is the number of non-responses sufficient to significantly change the statistical error? For instance, let's say they chose 40,000 and 20% didn't respond. If there were correlation between those 20% (say, for instance, many found the questions offensive because they didn't like their chastity being brought into question), that would give significant uncertainty to the results.
I guess I should go read the methodology for myself rather than making wild suppositions, but I just imagine there could be a lot of hidden uncertainty that get lost in the "95%" sound bite.
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