A much touted report released by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. costing taxpayers more than six million dollars reported little to no significant results on students participating in four small programs is being used to discredit abstinence education programs across the country.
“This is a sign of government waste at its worst,” stated Kathleen M. Sullivan, founder of Project Reality. Project Reality declined to take part in this study nearly ten years ago, when questions arose about possible flaws in study design, questionnaires and cost effectiveness. “Time has shown that our instinct not to participate in this study was correct,” Sullivan concluded.
“With more than 30 significant evaluations of abstinence programs indicating positive trends in the reduction of teen sexual behaviors and positive attitudinal shifts, this study seems like a six million dollar Trojan horse,” stated Libby Macke, Director of Project Reality. The study states that “programs had no effect on the sexual abstinence of youth..but also finds that youth in these programs were no more likely to have unprotected sex.”
More than 900 federally funded abstinence education programs regularly evaluate their programs and find them to be successful. Project Reality’s Game Plan and Navigator programs have been evaluated by the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and have been found to be extremely effective in positively changing teen’s attitudes and behavioral intentions surrounding sexual activity.
Several questions are being raised by abstinence educators about the validity of the Mathematica study, including:
Studying children as young as 3rd grade – not the average age for abstinence programs and/or sexual activity
Researching merely four programs - a very small sample of the 900 federally funded abstinence education programs
Choosing control groups from the same schools as the program intervention students. This carries a high likelihood of contamination between the control group and the intervention group
The number of students studied – 1,209 in the program and 848 in the control group – a very small sample size for spending more than six million dollars.
“We urge the government to stop wasting money on contracts with big business evaluation firms and let funded programs be evaluated by university researchers,” stated Libby Macke. “These six million dollars would have been better spent serving youth with already proven abstinence programs or evaluating federally funded condom-based sex education programs to assess whether or not they are effective.”
