Thursday 26 February 2009

WHEN BULLSH*T PRACTICALLY GALLOPS

My emphasis added to this report from the SMH courtesy of the "American Journal of Preventive Medicine" (????!!!!!!) …

A new US study has found that kids who listen to music with raunchy lyrics are more likely to engage in sexual activity than kids who don't.

The study, to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, did not find a causal link between crude music and teen sex, but indicated that "people who are exposed to certain messages in music are more likely to copy or emulate what they hear", said study author Dr Brian Primack in a statement ...

... The research in 2006-07 asked 711 year nine students around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about their sexual activity and the songs they liked to listen to ...

...The researchers found that youths who listened most to "degrading" songs were more than twice as likely to have had intercourse as other kids in the study ...

“Do you have sex Otis?”

“I rooted the teacher on the football field last week, Doc. So did Buster. And Randy too. Then we went and ate some Twinkies and watched “Iron Man” again.”

Former Fairfax writer and “Daily Truth” blogger Jack Marx had this to say on a similar topic in 2007, addressing Joan Sauers claims about teenage sexuality in her book
“Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers”

Testimony-based science is vexed at the best of times, human beings so prone to bullshit - both the agenda-driven variety and the seemingly pointless - as we all know they are. The risk is amplified when the theme is sex, a topic upon which everyone can be relied to either lie through embarrassment or embellish through boast. Add to that capricious brew the fact that your interview subjects are such notorious opponents of exactitude as teenagers, their respect for scientific endeavour so often overwhelmed by a lust for pranks and the crush of peer pressure, and you've got a pile of "data" that might easily be mistaken for a pile of something else

… Allow me to provide some preliminary conclusions of my own: the data in Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers is, for all academic purposes, frivolous junk, which no serious "specialist" should regard as having any more academic credibility than the Logies.

Yep. Reckon so.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate this kind of story. Might is not good enough. I can come up with that conclusion by pulling it out of my arse.
I'm sick of newspapers running such stories bust because of the sexual link.
What's worse is when such "research" is undertaken by a company and is treated as newsworthy - like "a survey of women has found that 89% perfer men to be clean shaven, according to research commissioned by Gillette". Often though the company name is hidden well within the story.

Ross Sharp said...

And on the front page of today's SMH (HUGE PICTURE) ... the headline story is SEX DIARIES!.

Fuckin' hell.