Washington (SmartAboutHealth) - Researchers have found that U.S. teens who make a virginity pledge are more likely to have unprotected sex before they are married when compared to teens who did not make the pledge.

Researchers were led by Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as they looked over data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

The idea behind the study was to see what type of impact a virginity pledge had on the sex lives of teens in the U.S.

Researchers discovered that there was no difference though when comparing teens who made the pledge to teens who did not in regards to when they started having sex.

The only difference seen was that a virginity pledge made teens have 0.1 less partners.

They also found though that teens who made this virginity pledge were more likely to have unprotected sex before marriage.

They were 10% less likely than teens who did not make the pledge to skip out on using condoms and other methods of birth control.

The study has been published in the journal Pediatrics.