Abstinence Pledges Five Years Later

Hypersexuality is a symptom of several psychiatric disorders, including mania, during adolescence. Therefore, factors that affect adolescents’ sexual behavior are relevant to psychiatrists. To examine the effect of abstinence pledging on sexual behavior, researchers examined data on high school students participating in the three-wave National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Because pledgers are typically more religious and more conservative than nonpledgers, the investigators matched nonpledgers to pledgers on certain variables to create a more powerful control than had been used in previous studies, which compared pledgers to all nonpledgers.

At wave 2, 289 students aged 15 or older acknowledged abstinence pledges; they were match…