The latest daft research which has come from the US claims that if you give a teen a smartphone they are more likely to have sex. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom which says that iPhone users are most likely to use their personality as a contraceptive.

The research, and we use the word loosely, is the work of Eric Rice, of the University of Southern California's School of Social Work in Los Angeles. He interviewed 1,840 high-school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. More than 71 percent were identified as Hispanic or Latino. The research claimed that teens who had access to the Internet on their mobiles were more than twice as likely to engage in sex with a person they met online compared with those without access to the Internet on their phones.

In fact teens with smartphones were also more likely to be sexually active in general, and more likely to say they had been approached for sex online. He claimed that researchers accounted for factors that could affect sexual behavior and cellphone use, such as age, gender, race and sexual orientation.

Rice admitted that smartphones likely aren't directly causing risky teen sex they just make it easier to get a shag. He said sex education programs should start to include discussions regarding the risks of seeking sex online. Looking at the statistics he gathered though, it would appear he reached some strange conclusions.

About one-third said they had a smartphone, five percent said they used the Internet to seek sex partners, and 17 percent said they had been approached for sex online. Forty-seven percent of teens who owned a smartphone said they were sexually active, compared with 35 percent of those who did not own a smartphone. So five percent of smart phone users are hitting on 17 per cent of other smartphone users meaning that 83 per cent have not used their smartphones as a sex aid. 

In otherwords the research is bogus.