What It Shows
This infographic shows a collection of nationwide and state-level statistic on teen pregnancy and abortion rates in America. The map of America with different states highlighted by teen pregnancy rate rank gets more quantified in more detail in the graph below it.
Why It’s Good
It’s certainly a very pretty infographic, with some very cleanly represented statistics. There is a lot of information here for learning about pregnancy in teens that is well displayed.
What It’s Missing
While it’s reasonably informative, this infographic has left me feeling like I need more information. It seems like it’s trying to make a claim about abstinence-only education and the effects on teen pregnancy rates, and while the data is somewhat interesting (generally states that refused abstinence-only funding performed better than states that didn’t refuse), the numbers aren’t very clear.
17.6% of states that declined abstinence-only funding had teen pregnancy rates above the national average, while 44% of those that didn’t decline had rates over the national average. It seems like the goal is to say that abstinence-only is bad, but can’t someone say that schools that taught abstinence-only education did better than the national average, overall, since both sides did? It seems like most states are below the national average, by a pretty sizable majority. So what’s messing up the stats?
In cases like this, the answer is that some states must be so bad that they throw the whole average out of whack. In this case, it seems like DC, the de facto 51st state, is doing the damage. So is this district of 600,000 in a country of 307,000,000 really fudging the numbers so much? How is the national average calculated? Total teen pregnancies divided by total US population? Or state teen pregnancies divided by state pregnancies, and each state’s totals averaged out? I don’t really know, and especially with this DC factor, I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m a sex education advocate, so I was hoping to have more clear information about this here.
Maybe I’m being thick about it, but I really am not sure what I’m supposed to be doing with the figures about
“Schools with 8th Grade Students Proficient in Reading in 2005″. The correlation between the purple graph and the blue graph isn’t obvious to me. Seems like states with higher proportions sometimes do better with teen pregnancy rates, and sometimes do worse. What am I missing?
While I appreciate the sourcing to an extent, listing a source as “Wikipedia” is a bit ridiculous. It’s like saying “the library”. You have to be more specific with your sources for it to have a point.
This infographic is found at Online Ultrasound School here.
