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Pledge? What pledge?

By RODNEY THRASH
Published July 7, 2006

A teenage virgin's word is about as good as Pinocchio's.

At least that's what one Harvard researcher has found. The findings were published in the June edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

More than 13,500 adolescents participated in a study about virginity pledges. What Janet Rosenbaum, a Harvard School of Public Health researcher, discovered was that teenagers - especially those who take chastity vows - aren't always truthful about their sexual past. She compared responses from the first survey with those from a follow-up survey. Some of the initial study's participants recanted their pledges or stories about their sexual experiences.

Here are excerpts from a press release summarizing the findings.

- RODNEY THRASH, Times staff writer

* * *

Adolescents who sign a "virginity pledge" and then go on to have premarital sex are likely to disavow having signed such a pledge, according to an analysis of survey data by Harvard School of Public Health HSPH researcher Janet Rosenbaum.

Conversely, adolescents who have had premarital sex and then decide to make a virginity pledge are likely to misreport their earlier sexual history . . .

Almost one-third of non-virgins in the first survey who later took a virginity pledge recanted their experience with sexual intercourse in the second survey. Adolescents who took virginity pledges or who later became born-again Christians were more likely to repudiate their earlier reports of having been sexually active. Of teens who reported a sexual experience at the first survey, those who later took a virginity pledge were four times as likely to retract reports of sexual experience as those who still had not taken a pledge at the second survey.

The analysis also found that 52 percent of adolescent virginity pledgers in the 1995 survey disavowed the virginity pledge at the next survey a year later. Additionally, 73 percent of virginity pledgers from the first survey who subsequently reported sexual intercourse denied in the second survey that they had ever pledged. Adolescents who end their affiliation with born-again Christianity or who had sexual intercourse were the groups most likely to deny their virginity pledges.

The author concludes that adolescents' self-reported history of sexual intercourse is an unreliable measure for studies of the effectiveness of virginity pledges. Moreover, the research suggests that teens' pervasive recanting of sex makes general research on teen sexuality of particular difficulty.

Word for Word is an occasional feature excerpting passages of interest from books, magazines, Web sites and other sources. Times staff writer Rodney Thrash can be reached at (727) 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 6, 2006, 12:52:19]