I know everyone over at slate is a super smart journalist with Ivy league credentials, but really are they this naieve? They really needed a study to figure this one out?
this cums as a surprise…
The basic conclusion isn’t necessarily a surprise, but often times the point of the study is not to demonstrate whether there is or is not an effect, but how strong it is compared to other effects like education, etc… They did not specify the effect in percentage difference terms or something like it, but that’s surely in the full data and a reasonable reason to go ahead and study it.
It’s also interesting that education had essentially no mediating effect on it. A smart dependent woman and a dumb dependent woman seem to have no difference. So policy responses that focus on education are perhaps wasted money, whereas policy that focuses on empowerment and financial independence may be more effective, assuming that the goal is to use more contraception.
The first think I noticed was “…a longitudinal study of 715 African American teens in Atlanta…”
Would the study results be different if there was a more diverse sample? Maybe we’d see different responses vs. ethnicity.