Teen Texting and Sex

Study links excessive texting among teens to sex, drugs.
The AP (11/10) reports, "Teens who text 120 times a day or more -- and there seems to be a lot of them -- are more likely to have had sex or used alcohol and drugs than kids who don't send as many messages, according to provocative new research." The authors of the study "aren't suggesting that 'hyper-texting' leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it's startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior."
In "Vital Signs," the New York Times (11/9, Rabin) reported that "the study by researchers at Case Western Reserve University, presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Public Health Association in Denver, is based on data from questions posed last year to more than 4,000 students at 20 urban high schools in Ohio." Approximately "one-fifth sent at least 120 text messages a day, one-tenth were on social networks for three hours or more, and four percent did both." Notably, "that four percent were at twice the risk of nonusers for fighting, smoking, binge drinking, becoming cyber victims, thinking about suicide, missing school, and dozing off in class."
"The hyper-texters were 3.5 more likely to have had sex than teens who texted less," the Time (11/9, Melnick) "Healthland" blog reported. "The hyper-networkers, however, were not more likely to have had sex compared with the hyper-texters," but "they did exceed the texters' predilection for fighting, drinking and drug use," according to the study authors.
Teen girls more likely to have risky sex, study suggests. The Time (11/9, Melnick) "Healthland" blog reported, "A doctoral candidate at Arizona State University made a surprising discovery during the course of her dissertation research on the impact of early sexual health education." Nicole Weller "found that regardless of what type of sex-ed they received, teen girls were 30% less likely than teen boys to use protection during their first sexual encounter. She also found that black teens were 40% less likely than white teens to use protection the first time they had sex." The researcher "presented her analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth, in which she looked at responses from 5,012 adolescents aged 11 to 19," at "the annual American Public Health Association Social Justice Meeting and Expo in Denver."