Obvious Research Findings: “Sex, drugs and dating make teens feel older”
This is reminiscent of the report earlier this year that teens and college students consume alcohol, and it’s bad for them. Again, people, I would have told you this for free instead of making you spend Canadian taxpayer money to finance a full-scale scientific study.
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, with assistance from the University of Victoria, surveyed a random sample of nearly 700 adolescents from a medium-sized North American city and asked them questions about dating, sexual experience, smoking, alcohol and drug use. The participants, males and females between 12 to 19 years of age, were also asked how old they felt compared to their same-sex peers. Survey results indicated that, as is typical for teens, the sample felt older than their chronological age.
Kelly Arbeau, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Alberta and co-author of the study, explained that she and her fellow researchers set out to find what’s behind the discrepancy between how old teens feel and how old they really are.
“We found that specific behaviors do have an effect on adolescents’ self-perceived age,” said Arbeau. “For example, having an older dating partner seems to give a teen a higher subjective experience of age.”
Sexual activity, especially starting at an earlier age, was found to have an important relationship to teens’ subjective experience of age (SEA). “Sexual experience is unequivocally the realm of adult behavior,” Arbeau explained. “So, when teens are having sex and their peers aren’t, it can make them feel more adult, more mature than their non-experienced counterparts.”
One interesting (though again unsprising) result was that the study seemed to bear out the popular wisdom that girls mature faster, confirming that girls feel older than boys do. But again, duh.
Have we discovered everything there is to discover? Are we left with just reconfirming stuff we already know?
Photo credit: Israel Papillon
Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King
Tags: age, boys, drinking, drugs, girls, Kelly-Arbeau, kids, older, Sex, teens, University-of-Alberta, University-of-Victoria, woman, women, Womens-HealthRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Sex
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1 opinion for Obvious Research Findings: “Sex, drugs and dating make teens feel older”
Neel
Jul 2, 2007 at 8:05 am
That’s true. When I was in college(that must be eight-ten years ago) sex was out of the question since we came from small towns and couldn’t really think about all those things until the idea of marriage came up. There was zero stress back then.
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