The Comparison Between a Press Article and an Academic Research Article on the Effects of
Teenage Sex
The original claim from the popular press article “Teenage sex ‘leads to bad moods’ later in life” By Ted Thornhill was that having sexual intercourse during teenage years will lead to the negative effects on the person as they age, such as the change of size of reproductive organs and a negative effect on brain development. During the first evaluation of this popular press article, I was skeptical and did not believe that it was a credibility article after analyzing the amount of evidence provided and where the article was posted. After carefully rereading the article by Thornhill and the research article that …show more content…
The first discrepancy is the age equivalent of the hamsters used. Morris, Weil and Nelson (2013) explained that 40 day old hamsters are the equivalent to approximately 13 year olds and 80 day old hamsters are the equivalent to approximately 16 year olds. Thornhill, however, used a different hamster to age ratio. He included that 40 day old hamsters were equivalent to 16-20 year olds and the 80 day old hamsters were equivalent to adults (Thornhill, 2011). Thornhill tweaked the information included in the research article to better support his claim, instead of using the real age of 13 and 16. He also left out information on how they not only using the two different age groups and a control, but they also had two different time frames in which they checked the progress of how to the hamsters were behaving and their mental processes. Morris, Weil and Nelson (2013) checked the process of the hamsters either 40 days after they mated or 80 days after they mated to see a short and long term effect on the hamsters. By leaving out important information to the experiment and changing the age equivalents from the research article, it is hard to find Thornhill’s article …show more content…
However, there were other findings that concluded that teenage sex could also potentially lead to an immune system that was more likely to get infected with diseases (Morris, Weil, and Nelson, 2013). There is also an entire other experiment that was done in the research article that was not mentioned once in the popular press article. The main difference between the popular press article by Thornhill and the academic article by Morris, Weil and Nelson is that the academic article went into detail on how they avoided outside factors that could disrupt their results. The animal’s rooms were maintained the same temperature and humidity for all the hamsters, even the control (Morris, Weil, & Nelson, 2013). Siberian hamsters were the specific type used during this experience for multiple reasons. Arguably the most important one in terms of dealing with outside factors is that Siberian hamsters are rarely used in the laboratory setting which helped avoid the possibility of the results being obscene due to long term captivity breeding (Morris, Weil & Nelson, 2013). I was critical of Thornhill’s article due to the lack of details of the experiment and how it was conducted to remove the aspect of outside factors, and it decreases his credibility more since it was included, in detail, in the research article.
The reason why academic writing includes detail