Sex education and abstinence programs: Why don't we know more?

Although the need to understand the efficacy of various sex education and abstinence programs has never been greater, evaluation data available are limited. There are at least four reasons for this: (1) the cost of good evaluation, (2) methodological difficulties in such research, (3) a social environment in which research on fertility-related topics may be seen as controversial, and (4) with abstinence programs, the possibility that a prejudice against an abstinence message for young people has limited the pool of funds available from the private sector for research on this approach. All these issues must be addressed if we are to have a rich array of information on which to base programming.