Poly/STD Spread

[greenstorm]

So here's an article on a bunch of non-poly high school students, as some sort of a comment on serial monogamy being safer (I assume these are the relationships they'd admit to).

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/28/romantic_and_sex_rel.html

Comments

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

1) I don't think they're saying serial monogamy is SAFER, I think they're saying that now they have a model of serial monogamy among certain teens (see pt 2) from which they now plan to base safer-sex ed from.
2) "As part of that study in 1995, researchers interviewed nearly all students at an unidentified Midwestern school that they renamed “Jefferson High School.” It is an almost all-white school, and is the only public high school in this mid-sized city, which is more than an hour away from the nearest metropolitan area." This quote demonstrates my main issue with this study: it's not broad enough to clearly determine the 'norm' of teen sexual behavious, since it seems that they have chosen a white-middle class, possibly homogenous, high school. Teen in urban high schools, or teens from different backgrounds, or teens from heterogenous high schools might have vastly different sexual behaviour patterns. I recall some 'clusters' (which is not the typical pattern here) happening in my high school, which was mostly white but with large pencentages of Indian and Asian students, from all sorts of class backgrounds. Basically, I fear that educators will take this study as gospel, and ignore epidemiological issues that might arise in different situations.
3) You're right: Since the information was apparently sought through interviews, it's very possible that the kids were NOT as forthcoming as they might be in anonymous surveys or questionnaires. I wonder why they chose interviews? hrm.

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

No, they're not trying to say monogamy is safer. I was brought up (white, middle-class) to believe that if you were monogamous and didn't have sex with over ten people in your lifetime, you could not catch an STD. STDs were an evil visited on you for being promiscuous (this wasn't my mom bringing me up, this was my high school/teacher consensus). It's interesting to see how completely wrong this belief is.

Someone on the original post (on polyamory lj community) pointed out the extreme lack of homo/bisexual encounters in here too - which makes sense with the interview-based thing.

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

Ok, it's just the test of your original message seems to state that you think the authors are claiming so: "So here's an article on a bunch of non-poly high school students, as some sort of a comment on serial monogamy being safer (I assume these are the relationships they'd admit to)."

Which confused me.

It's possible the scope of the original study wasn't on same-sex relationships, which is a shame, because it works into the whole safer sex issues. I theorize that the number of same-sex sex encounters vs same sex relationships is MUCH lower. Also, when doing a study like this, quantifying all the factors is difficult, so they might have gotten lazy. Or maybe they didn't see it as 'important', which smacks of several different levels of homophobia/heterosexism.

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, should have written 'as some sort of comment on my childhood indoctrination that serial monogamy is safer' or somethin.

Someone did find one same-sex relationship in the diagram, apparently.

[khamura.livejournal.com]

There's at least four of them.

Courtesy of the people at wtf_inc, who have nothing better to do with their time. ;)

Algorithm anthropology and same-sex couples

[saxifrage00.livejournal.com]

I count two, one MM at the tip of a side-branch of the easternmost branch of the large chain, and one FF in the 10-member chain. (*reads that link*) Okay, I missed the third obvious MM too. (*Makes a mental note for cognitive science about image-processing mistakes*) I think there aren't more than those three same-sex couples in there, though. (If you're counting bisexual people like they did through that link, though, you get a different number.)

In the largest chain there are two places where M dots are ambiguously close together. However, the layout algorithm seems to enforce a minimum distanct between connected nodes so that the black connecting bar is visible, while the algorithm seems to be sloppy in enforcing minimum distances between unconnected nodes. I think the other two seemingly-MM pairs are actually just artefacts of that layout flaw.

Yes, too much time on my hands and a fascination for algorithm anthropology. :-)

[lazarus7.livejournal.com]

interesting to look at that chart and see the only non heterosexuality is one occurence between two boys (one of whom is bisexual)

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

actually, at least 2 other non-het relationships are somewhere on there.

it's a problematic study.

[khamura.livejournal.com]

See my comment above, there are more. :>

Made for an interesting variation on "Where's Waldo?!" ;)

[lazarus7.livejournal.com]

ah ... thank you.