A study by RAND corp? They probably hate sex.

This seems like a terribly flawed study to me. Presumably, the T.V. shows picked for the study are pretty popular T.V. shows (being racy… sex sells and all). So, isn’t the study really saying “teens who watch popular programming are more likely to get pregnant” and isn’t that awfully close to “teens who are popular are more likely to get pregnant”?

I mean, sure, the kid watching That 70s Show and Gossip Girl is probably more likely to get pregnant than a kid who watches Lawrence Welk and Little House on the Prairie but isn’t that mostly because the later teen is less likely to have sex? (Well, yes, that seems obvious, but what I mean here is not “less likely to want to have sex” but “less likely to find someone willing to have sex with them”). I mean if you re-did the study with SciFi shows instead of racy shows, I suspect you’d see viewers being less likely to get pregnant than non-viewers, but isn’t that more connected to the difficulties of a Trekkie in getting laid than to the high moral content of Star Trek?

It seems to me kinda like saying that kids who listen to rock and roll are more likely to get pregnant than kids who listen to polka. But couldn’t that be because no one wants to go out with, let alone have sex with, the kids who listen to polka?

University stats class…. confounding of the explanatory variates…..