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If the intention is to expose young people to porn and then measure longitudinally how they fare in life, ethical issues aside, I suspect that wouldn't work bec

If the intention is to expose young people to porn and then measure longitudinally how they fare in life, ethical issues aside, I suspect that wouldn't work because your control group is very likely to become contaminated. And good luck getting the experiment underwritten. Rather I think you'd take a large sample of adults at a given age range, interview them as to the earliest age they recall consuming pornography, and compare it with their life outcomes: income, alcohol addiction, educational achievement, etc. Of course you're only measuring a correlation, but at least you'll be able to get your study funded. And naturally such studies have been done, although I suspect many are agenda driven: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.791 https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.79... (Many many more results in a casual web search)

htag 3y ago
If you go the interview approach you'll run into many potential confounds. If the average age of first exposure is 13, and someone says they waited until 17, it's possible that a third variable delayed them from seeking porn and also will have an impact on other life incomes. This is why random assignment is the gold standard. With a large enough sample size random assignment will account for all confounds. Here, we can only measure likely confounds and attempt to 'account for' them with statistics. All of these introduces more noise and generally reduces the validity of the study. In general, I dismiss all scientific studies with these looking back questionnaires as little more than well documented hunches.