900 Parents of Teens, check this out

There’s no way to know if high school romances have changed that much since you and I were young, Maggie, because no one investigated it with sophisticated mapping until recently. But if you’ve got teen-agers who are dating, you might want to take a look at this research and review the facts of life and STDs with them.

“For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.”

“James Moody, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University, said this network could be compared to rural phone lines, running from a long main trunk line to individual houses. As a comparison, many adult sexual networks are more like an airline hub system where many points are connected to a small number of hubs.” Report of his study here.

Click on this link, and you’ll see there were only 63 monogamous couples in the whole school! Everyone less was more or less, sexually linked. A to B, B to C (and therefore C to A), and B to D (and therefore D to A, B and C, and so forth) Pink dots are female; blue are male. Isn’t that cute?

Because the OSU research announcements go to my spam dump which I only read occasionally, I happened to see this at Collision Detection. Don’t know when it first appeared, so my apologies if you've all seen this.

Update: Math was my weak link. I think I've changed the number of this 4 times.