Reading the article about teens sexting last week was particularly interesting, and discussing it was even more interesting. This discussion made me remember a study I read years ago about the correlation between teen pregnancy rate and abstinence-only sex education. This study eventually became my inspiration for a paper I wrote for a mathematics paper. I compared the teen pregnancy rate in each state and both the % of Christians in the state the prominent religion.
The original study I read discusses the culture in the American education system as it relates to sex education. In the past decades, as the study states, the United States has ranked first in teen pregnancies among the world’s developed countries. In an effort to change this, the government has funded abstinence education for many years. When people talked about the study, they often said that the states with the highest level of abstinence only sex education were often states that were the most religious and the most conservative state. This made me wonder if the religion of a state could have a correlation with the teen pregnancy rate. They had adjusted the study to account for socioeconomic status, education, and ethnicity and still found that there was a clear trend. One factor they did not take into account that slightly surprised me was the religion. Therefore, I took it into my own, statistically-competent hands to find out if a correlation existed.
This graph contains 48 different points (for each contiguous state) that have the teen pregnancy rate and the Christianity percentage. The data was taken from Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life and also the original study and compiled. While the data does not seem to provide a very clear correlation or function to estimate the teen pregnancy rate based on the percentage of Christians, it seems to suggest there is a positive correlation between Christianity percentage and teen pregnancy rate. This is despite a weak r^2 value of only .185, but this is still a significant r^2 value.
The next aspect I analyzed was the prominent religion in a state. I used this and the average teen pregnancy rate of all of the states with each prominent religion. This graph portrays my findings, which shows that states with the prominent religion of evangelical christian, on average, have a higher teen pregnancy rate. The Mormon statistics here can be seen as an outlier, as only Utah had Mormonism as a prominent religion, and this is a small sample size as Utah has a very low population.
While writing this paper, I saw some interesting things. Seeing the trend was only mildly shocking, since there is a clear correlation between religion and abstinence only education. After looking over this paper again, I thought of the mean girls scene of the gym teacher (“don’t have sex or you’ll die”).
So, I suppose the overall question that both this and the sexting article brings up is “How should teens be educated about sex?” This question is a fairly controversial one for many people on both sides of the argument. Some people think that the only things educators should tell teens about sex is not to have it, simple as that. Others on the other end of the spectrum think that that is silly and that teens should be adequately educated on all aspects of sex, including how to be safe when they have sex. In the middle somewhere, which is where some classrooms are moving to, is that teens should not necessarily encouraged to have sex, but be educated how to do it safely to prevent pregnancy and the spread of STD’s. Although the teen pregnancy rate in the United States will never be reduced to zero, it certainly could be lower than #1.
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