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How Can I Talk About … ?
The Best Friends Program Assessment
A recently released study claims that girls who are enrolled in the Best Friends abstinence-only program are substantially less likely to engage in premarital sex than peers who are not in the program.
The study was released this month in Adolescent & Family Health, a journal published by the conservative Institute for Youth Development.
Best Friends, which recently received a three-year federal abstinence-only-until-marriage grant from the federal government, does not teach girls about contraception.
The assessment by Robert Lerner compared data on Best Friends girls in the DC area with data from girls of the same age and in DC school districts that were part of the federal Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS).
Among other findings, Lerner's study reports that Best Friends girls were six times less likely than YRBS girls to report premarital sex.
ANALYSIS & TALKING POINTS:
- Robert Lerner's study is more of a description than an evaluation of the program's impact. It provides a snap shot of those young people that choose to be in the Best Friends program versus those that do not. It provides no information on the program's effectiveness and appears to belabor the obvious: young people that self-select to join such an abstinence group are more abstinent than those who don't.
- The study does not report on how many young people drop out of the Best Friends program. Nor does it follow participants in order to provide follow-up data. Thus, this study tells us nothing about the actual impact of the program.
- Best Friends may provide a good support group for young people who choose to remain in the program. As for those who quit, the study is silent. However, recent research conducted on other virginity pledge programs by University of Columbia's Peter Bearman suggest that young people who take an abstinence pledge search for "loopholes" to keep this pledge intact, such as engaging in risky oral or anal sex. Those that break their pledge are at higher risk for engaging in unprotected sex when they become sexually active than are their non-pledging peers.
- Seventy percent of young people have sex by the age of 18. It is our moral obligation to provide these young people with all of the facts and information they need to protect their health and well-being.
Date Last Updated: May 16, 2005.
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