Comments on: Guttmacher Instutite Research on Adolescent Sexuality Trends Analyzed by Me!

By: karenrayne

karenrayne — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:01:05 +0000

Fascinating topic, Neel! I will e-mail you with specific follow-up questions about your research plans.

By: Neel Ramdutt

Neel Ramdutt — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:10:29 +0000

Hi Dr Rayne,
I am currently reading towrads a Phd degree with the university of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN)in South Africa. My topic of interest is on teenage pregnancy at our schools. We have had 15220 girls who were pregnant in 2007, and 14259 in 2008 at our schools across KZN which is a province.I wish to explore this phenomenon from a psychosocial- sexual perspective. I am also making a parallel study comparing our Zulu girls to the Japanese schoolgirls who practice ENJO KOSAI, as our local girls are also motivated by materialism and consumerism. I would really appreciate your input in my study, with regard to methodology and reserach techniques, that one can use in order to illicit valid and relaible data. My supervsors suggested using drawings/sketches on the everday experiences of the girl child in our schools, but I am a bit apprehensive about this as I doubt that I will recieve the data that I require. However I will field test this to check its potential. Any further advice or assisatance will be most appreciated.
Thanks
Neel Ramdutt

By: cadbury

cadbury — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:40:09 +0000

i have a question about the data gathering - especially on the anal sex front…

was all this data self-declared? i know you can’t go wandering around fact checking, but based on my experience i don’t trust surveys of teens - especially teen males.

something over 20 years ago when i was in high school we did some surveys on sex for our university

when we discussed it after some of the guys talked about bullshitting on how often they had sex and how many girls

some years later that survey came up in conversation at the university pub with a few of the guys (i didn’t spend much time with high school friends). all of us admitted to having faked answers on what we had done. only one of us had actually been sexually active (beyond kissing/groping) - and that was only receiving oral sex - not vaginal or anal sex - which several had said they engaged in

now i understand that young people do more earlier now, but i remember articles based on survey stats from the time talking about incidence of anal sex and how worrying it was…

and i think about that pub conversation and the bullshit spewed by teenaged males - especially when listening to my son’s(16) 14-16-18 year old friends.

By: Margaret Pevec

Margaret Pevec — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:36:01 +0000

I appreciate your analysis of the Guttmacher study. I don’t have time to pull apart their research, but as a sex-educator it is helpful information. One question I have: when I hear “oral sex” I always think they’re talking about fellatio AND cunnilingus. I had a hard time understanding how kids could be doing both in the back of a classroom (or some such rumor I heard…I never checked it out). Then someone pointed out that kids were engaging in fellatio (a whole lot easier to do in public situations). So, now I’m confused. Saying “oral sex” is awfully ambiguous when discussing a research study, isn’t it? So, my question is, when Guttmacher is saying “oral sex” are have they actually collected data from teens about cunnilingus and fellatio?