The internets were atwitter yesterday with this revelation:

Reality check: 95 percent of Americans had premarital sex - CNN.com:
Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

"The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds," Finer said.Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding."It would be more effective," Finer said, "to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active -- which nearly everyone eventually will."

When I first read the news I wasn't shocked about the findings. I was dumfounded that nobody had done it in the first place. Seriously ... we've had almost 20 years of abstinence bullshit and it's now we have evidence about pre-marital sex?

Well, I downloaded the report (PDF) and took a quick look at it. I did very limited statistical studies while working on an Economics major that I ended up not pursuing, so I can't really assess the metholdology. What I get from the methodology's description is that the data used (which goes back to 1982), was evaluated in a way that it had not been intended before.

Mole333 may be able to make better sense of this than me. But this "new" way of reading the statistics may be the reason why for over 20 years there has been no statistical counter-narrative to the "abstinence only" crowd.

And it proposes an important point : That objectivity is just a way of expressing the majority's point of view.