>The “kids” aren’t “kids” and they aren’t “teens.” And they wait 3 years longer than their peers and no one knows if they even had a sex ed course in school.
Fox News reports on their interview with the author of a report on teens who take virginity pledges. She told them that religious teens wait 3 years longer than non-religious teens and (as reported here, last week), the background of those who take virginity pledges is more important than the pledge itself.
Click here to read the study in Pediatrics.
Note that there is no way to know whether any of the students took any type of abstinence-based sexuality education course, that the ages of the “pledgers” and “non-pledgers” evaluated and matched in the study were at least 15 in the first “wave,” 22 or so at the end, and the average age of first intercourse for the group is 21 years old, three years older than the national average.
Rosenbaum, the author of the “new” study also removed all of the married participants in the study:
Her study also only looked at teens who were unmarried five years after taking virginity pledges, now ages 20 to 23. “The married are out of the picture, so they’re not as interesting,” she said.
Edited 1/3/09 at 6 AM.
LifeEthics 
>There has been quite a bit of debate elseblog and on digg about this one. Some people have issues with compensation.From what I gather – and I havn't read the study myself – if you look at the raw data, the pledging sample actually had far less sex than the non-pledgeing, which appears to suggest that the pledge works. However, this is an illusion caused by a bias in the data: Students who take the pledge are largely from highly religious, socially conservative families. Those who arn't in a pledge program usually arn't. If you apply the appropriate measures to compensate for this, the real effect of the pledges is revealed to be minimal – while being from a religious background is (unsurprisingly) a strong deterrent towards premarital sex, making a virginity pledge is not.
Posted by Suricou Raven | January 12, 2009, 2:10 am>The two groups measured in this study were matched for background at about 1 year prior to the time that some the teens answered "yes" to having signed a pledge. and approximately 2 years beforeRe-read: both groups studied had similar rates of sex partners, their first sex approximately 3 years older than the average teen, beginning at 21 rather than 17 or 18. There
Posted by LifeEthics.org | January 12, 2009, 2:43 am