I found this article on msnbc about a new study publishin the journal Reproductive Health that shows a strong correlation between a state’s religiosity and its teenage pregnancy rates. The state of science journalism being what it is, I decided to find the actual study online, and located the abstract here.
My greatest interest was in the “Results” section. If you have no background in the social sciences let me explain something about the statistics. “Increased religiosity in residents of states in the U.S. strongly predicted a higher teen birth rate, with r = 0.73 (p<0.0005).” Statistically, if r=1, then the rates of religiosity and teen pregnancy would correlate (go up or go down together) perfectly; at r=0.73, the correlation is at 73 percent, meaning that the two variables rise and fall together rough three-quarters of the time. (For the more stistically saavy, I no that this isn’t a completely accurate explanation of how statistics work, but cut me some slack, this is hard!) The p variable tells you how likely that the results you got were due to chance. When I used to work on sociology studies, p=.05 was acceptable and p=.01 was preferred; this means that your results would have respectively a 5% or 1% probability of being due to random chance rather than a real relationship between them. Now look at the article’s p value: p<0.0005. A p<0.0005 means that there is only a 0.05% chance that the results are due to randomness, or put another way, the chance of getting their results due to chance rather than because there is a real relationship between the variable is 5 in 10,000!
So to take a completely unreasonable ( but very fun) take on it: if you want to drastically lower the teenage pregnancy rate, simply ban all children from exposure to religion! BWAHAHAHA!!!
