This study fills a major gap in research, revealing that sports may well be an untapped resource in the nation's struggle to prevent teen pregnancy.
This study fills a major gap in research, revealing that sports may well be an untapped resource in the nation's struggle to prevent teen pregnancy. Many Americans believe that sports help to lower girls' risk for pregnancy. Parents breathe easier because their daughters are busy and chaperoned while attending after-school sports programs. Coaches tell stories about girls for whom the self-esteem supplied by sports helped ward off peer pressures to have sex. Some corporate advertisers point to sport as a key solution to the problem of teen pregnancy.
Despite such claims, however, researchers have failed to systematically investigate the connections between athletic participation and girls' risk for pregnancy1. Moreover, only a handful of educational or community-based programs have used athletic participation as a strategic centerpiece for reducing teen pregnancy.
The Women's Sports Foundation Report: Sport and Teen Pregnancy opens a door for understanding the largely unexamined connections between athletic participation, sexual behavior and teen pregnancy. So that reliable research findings could be generated, the Women's Sports Foundation pooled funds with the Packard Foundation, the RGK Foundation, the Sara Lee Foundation, and the Turner Foundation in order to develop a comprehensive research design that tested whether athletic participation is tied to a reduced risk of teen pregnancy.
And what about boys? Are male athletes more or less likely than non-athletes to be involved with a pregnancy? Do boys learn lessons in the locker room that encourage them to "score" with girls and measure their masculine self-worth in terms of sexual conquest? Or are male athletes too caught up with training, discipline, and dreams of athletic success, too committed to a "clean body, clean mind" ethic to risk unprotected sex and consequent involvement with pregnancy? These questions remain unanswered, both because research on teen pregnancy and prevention programs has focused mainly on girls and because the role of sports in male sexual development has only recently begun to be studied. While the emphasis of this study is mainly on girls, we do include some findings that pertain to boys.
The findings and conclusions in this report were derived from the analyses of two different sources of data: (1) the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a nationally representative sample of 11,000 students in grades 9 through 12; and (2) the Family and Adolescent Study, a New York State Research Institute on Addiction study funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which includes a representative household sample of adolescents from 699 families from Western New York. Our data analyses provided a comprehensive and reliable assessment of the influence of athletic participation on adolescent sexual behavior and pregnancy risk. Some racial and ethnic groups were not represented in large enough numbers for reliable statistical analyses to be done; e.g., Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders.
Some specific findings documented by this study include:
1. Female Athletes Were Less Likely to Get Pregnant
Female athletes in the nationwide survey were less than half as likely to get pregnant as female non-athletes (5% and 11%, respectively). Moreover, significantly reduced rates of pregnancy were found for the subsamples of African-American, Caucasian, and Latina/Hispanic female athletes.
2. Female Athletes Were More Likely to Be Virgins
Female athletes were significantly more likely to report that they had never had sexual intercourse than female non-athletes. While 54% of the female athletes said they had never had sexual intercourse, 41% of the non-athletes reported the same.
3. Female Athletes Had Their First Intercourse Later in Adolescence
Female non-athletes were about twice as likely as female athletes to experience their first intercourse between the ages of 10 to 13 (15% and 8%, respectively in the nationwide survey, and 9% and 2% in the Western New York survey). The onset of coital activity was significantly later for female athletes than female non-athletes.
4. Female Athletes Had Sex Less Often
Female athletes in Western New York had sexual intercourse less frequently than female non-athletes. While less than a third of female athletes (30%) acknowledged having sexual intercourse four or more times during the past year, almost half of non-athletes (49%) did so.
5. Female Athletes Had Fewer Sex Partners
Female athletes had fewer sex partners than their non-athletic counterparts. While 29% of athletes in the nationwide survey said they had two or more partners during their lifetime, 37% of the non-athletes said so. The figures for the Western New York study were 24% and 39%, respectively.
6. Mixed Results for Male Athletes
Male athletes in Western New York experienced their first sexual intercourse earlier than male non-athletes. In the national study, African-American male athletes also experienced coital onset earlier than the non-athletes. However, no other consistent pattern of differences emerged between male athletes and non-athletes.
7. Athletes Are More Likely to Use Contraceptives
Among sexually active adolescents in the nationwide survey, both female athletes (87%) and male athletes (85%) reported higher rates of contraceptive use than their non-athletic counterparts. Specifically in regard to condom use, however, only female athletes were significantly more likely to report use than female non-athletes (53% and 41%, respectively).
Our results strongly suggest that, for girls, sports may be used as a developmental strategy in programs intended to reduce teen pregnancy. In order to tap this potential, a Policy Advisory Panel was formed to draw up the policy recommendations included in this report.