sex on tv equals teen pregnancies?

Research into teen pregnancy seems to be rife with confusing causation and correlation.

A few days ago I came across an article on Time.com from November of 2008 which claims that a team at the RAND Corporation found a strong, empirical link between exposure to sexual content on TV shows and the risk of teen pregnancies.

According to the report, watching sexually charged programming during teenage years increases the change of pregnancy or impregnating a partner by almost 15% over a four year period, twice as much as watching shows that feature less sexual content. But don't touch that censorship dial just yet. While this report is a serious attempt at trying to establish the long rumored link between risqué media and teen pregnancy, it falls short on crucial points.

As the researchers acknowledge, this is a very complex topic and teenage girls get pregnant for a lot of different reasons. To try and control for some of the factors, they tried to adjust for a few behaviors associated with an increased risk of pregnancy, such as skipping school. Single parent households were also taken into account as a risk factor to try and isolate TV exposure as the sole culprit.

But there was no control group in the study. Instead, there were interviews with about 1,700 teens in which the focus was on whether they watch one or more of some 23 popular shows judged by the researchers to be highly sexual in content, which is usually a rather subjective call.

Surely, a company with significant resources could've found a small sample of teenagers living in very strict and conservative communities which tend to ban television and interviewed them over a four year period as well. If the report's findings are correct, they should have the lowest overall risk of pregnancy.

If they follow the median or high exposure risk lines, we would know that sex on TV either has no significant effect or that the study is incomplete. Without having a good control, it's hard to say how meaningful a correlation you find really is. Let's keep in mind that correlation doesn't prove causation, and that many other forces might be at play in this complex question.

After all, we can't forget that teenagers don't get the urge to have sex just because they saw it on the shiny screen at home. They're reaching their sexual maturity and their desire to have sex is a natural part of growing up. Media and pop culture can certainly influence how they think of sex, but they have to be attracted to sexually charged programming in the first place.

There's also the vastly important factor of sex education that wasn't considered by the researchers and it plays a significant role in when teenagers have sex, whether they use contraception and if they use it effectively.

Without considering these issues and giving them a great deal of weight when compiling the statistics, all we have are random surveys and rather sweeping conclusions based on how sexual 23 popular TV shows are considered to be. The conclusions make for an Instant Controversy(TM) and splashy articles, but without a lot of additional investigation, they're probably not the kind of guidelines from which you'd want to develop far-reaching policies on media and pediatric care.