Comments from feedback form - "Source should be a peer review..."
Source should be a peer reviewed journal not some news org,, Larger sample with out parental permission constraint needed. Parental permission my slant finding, children who were not allowed in study may have shifted the outcome to a more or less restrained result. Overall a very informative study.
I agree that the results of the study were limited. This was no doubt due to the sponsors being a condom company. What would be far more interesting to see is a study which correlates mental health outcomes with a variety of adolescent sexual behaviours. There has been at least one highly interesting study in the 1970s(1975?) linking sexual taboos which disallow adolescent sexual experimentation to poor mental health and behavioural outcomes. I can't find the particular reference but will keep looking till I find it again and repost. The outcomes include violence, porn addiction, particularly sadistic porn, low esteem of and status for women, drug abuse, association with prostitution, general disregard of humans, other animals and the environment. The list goes on to include stuff like approval of the death penalty, voting Republican, exhibitionistic dancing...... I leave it to others to draw conclusiions. I have yet to find another study quite like it and was led to it by linking from a DeMause(Historian) site. Will now try to find reference. Ciao
I wouldn't call it "very informative", it's a very small study paid by a condom company trying to make people talk about teens sexuality and condoms, and at the same time doing that so they can say in their ads/websites "we pay for sexual studies, we actually care about your health" and drop some random stats/studies numbers out of nowhere.
I understand it's a good (and vital) thing to promote safe sex and condoms, to bring down the "masturbation is bad/make you blind/etc" crap, but this is not "science".
Other (more serious) studies showed masturbation and sex life in general are more private and intimate for girls (than for boys) so the results are always biased, since it is still socially not very acceptable to speak about your self-pleasuring habits when you are a "nice little princess who never poo nor cheat on her husband (otherwise she's a wh***-b*tch-c**t) and is alway pure". Even in 100% private environment (best friend, private diary), it is still difficult for girls to admit they are masturbating or having marsturbation desire.
From I have read here and there (can't remember the studies names/articles url), IIRC, it seems girls tend to masturbate less often (personal opinion: to dodge the "sex slut" disgrace - even from the intimate self-esteem point), only during specific moments of their life (when the hormones are too high - once they're adults, they rapidly ban masturbation from their toolbox - only to get it back later once they understand this is not evil/selfish). There's also slightly less girls actually masturbating (between 10% to 30% less than boys, not 50% like it's said in this study), imo because of the old sexual taboo and myths.
The parental green-light just make it worse : all the teens knew the study will be published and their parent will read the results, the social pressure was higher than in a "normal" survey environment.