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for STDs and HIV.4 Though programs vary somewhat in their specific goals, most share the same premise: Expanded condom availability will increase the proportion of protected sexual encounters, particularly when it is accompanied by education and information about safer sex. Opponents have responded that distributing condoms in a school will legitimate and thus increase the prevalence of sexual intercourse among students there.5 To date, only two studies have directly evaluated the impact of condom distribution on rates of protected and unprotected intercourse among teenagers in schools with such services.6 Our study is one of the first to examine whether condom access programs increase the incidence of protected sex, as proponents claim, and whether providing condoms in schools promotes sexual activity among students, as critics argue. Answering these questions poses a series of methodological challenges. Ideally, a program evaluation should employ an experimental design that randomly assigns programs to schools or individuals to programs. These approaches are difficult to implement for both ethical and organizational reasons. A more practical, if not wholly desirable, alternative involves comparing changes in behavior over time in schools where programs have been initiated and in similar schools without programs. This approach requires time-series or, better, longitudinal data on youths in both types of schools. To our knowledge, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., is Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, and Christopher C. Weiss is a doctoral candidate in sociology and demography, at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Lynne Maziarz Geitz is senior analyst, Abt Associates, Cambridge, Mass.; and Julien O. Teitler is research associate, Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J. The study on which this article is based was supported by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant 2089. Does Condom Availability Make a Difference? An Evaluation of Philadelphia’s Health Resource Centers