Context Effects on Abortion Questions: Who is Inconsistent

American Journal of Public Health, 2001

Objectives. The reliability of abortion self-reports has raised questions about the general usefulness of surveys in research about abortion behavior; however, the extent of underreporting remains a subject of some debate. This study sought to examine abortion reporting in a sample of welfare mothers and to determine factors in underreporting. Methods. In New Jersey, which covers abortions requested by welfare recipients under its Medicaid program, the responses of a randomly drawn sample of 1236 welfare mothers about abortion events were compared with the Medicaid claims records of these women. Results. Only 29% of actual abortions were self-reported by the women in the sample. This finding varied dramatically by race, with substantially higher rates of underreporting by Blacks than by Whites or Hispanics. Conclusions. Although race is the most consistent predictor of underreporting behavior, attitudinal factors and survey technology also help in explaining abortion reporting behav...

Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2004

Although the 2000 Republican and Democratic national party platforms show the parties at opposite poles on abortion policy, Governor George W. Bush publicly supported a vaguely defined "culture of life," rather than the constitutional amendment barring abortion that was advocated by his party. In light of Bush's campaign strategy, this article uses national survey data to examine the accuracy of citizens' knowledge of the candidates' abortion policy positions. Interestingly, pro-choice Republican voters were much less likely to defect from their party in 2000 than in 1996, suggesting that the Bush campaign's efforts to avoid public opposition to his abortion position were successful. In August of 2000, a self-avowed fundamentalist Christian who had publicly pledged to "do everything in my power to restrict abortion" earned the Republican Presidential nomination in Philadelphia. 1 In an apparent attempt to diffuse this controversial issue, throughout the nomination and presidential campaign Governor George W. Bush obscured his abortion views and avoided discussing the topic. His official position is that abortion should be outlawed except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.

Day Care & Early Education, 1983

Data from the NORC General Social Survey 1972–1980 are examined to determine the extent to which the conflict over legal abortion has come to be associated, in the structure of public opinion, with broader ideological differences concerning sexuality, feminism, and political liberalism. Specifically, attitudes toward premarital sex, homosexuality, women's roles, liberal versus conservative political self-identification, and views on government spending policies are examined as possible ideological correlates of position on abortion. Log-linear analysis demonstrates that a clear, significant, and persistent association exists between abortion attitude and each of the other five issues, independent of religion, education, or sex of the respondent. Furthermore, there is no evidence of any change from 1972 to 1980 in the strength of the association of abortion attitude with any of the other questions considered, despite the increased polarization and politicization of the abortion issue over the time period studied.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Differential fertility is frequently overlooked as a meaningful force in longitudinal public opinion change. The researchers examine the effect of fertility on abortion attitudes, a useful case study due to their strong correlation with family size and high parent-child correlation. They test the hypothesis that the comparatively high fertility of pro-life individuals has led to a more pro-life population using 34 years of General Social Survey data (1977-2010). They find evidence that the abortion attitudes have lagged behind a liberalizing trend of other correlated attitudes, and consistent evidence that differential fertility between pro-life and pro-choice individuals has had a significant effect on this pattern. Future studies should account for differential fertility as a meaningful force of cohort replacement in studies of public opinion where parents and children are likely to share the same attitude.

Michigan Family Review, 2016

Abortion is a topic and practice with deep socio-political undergirding. While research on attitudes toward abortions is prevalent, less is known about perceptions of the frequency of abortion in the general population. Using primary data gathered from an online survey of students, faculty and staff of two public universities in the U.S., we found that people generally underestimate the percentage of pregnancies that end in abortion. We discuss this finding and the role of demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral variables in the abortion estimates made by respondents. Additionally, we discuss the implications of these findings, taking into consideration the societal effects of a potential correction of the underestimation of abortion rates.

Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law, 2023

The relationship between people's attitudes toward abortion acceptability and the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, two distinct but related issues, has not been rigorously explored. Using a mixed methods approach, we analyzed in-depth interviews to better understand how participants' feelings toward abortion acceptability are related to perceptions of whether abortion should be legal. Then, we assessed (i) correlations between abortion acceptability and different measures of support for Roe v. Wade (ii) how the phrasing of survey items related to Roe v. Wade may evoke different responses via online surveys fielded in 2018. Our qualitative results highlight that there is a disjuncture between people's moral feelings toward abortion and their attitudes toward abortion legality. Our quantitative results further demonstrate that correlations between abortion acceptability and support for Roe v. Wade are not strong, but rather moderate, and the differences in responses to the phrasing of survey items related to Roe v. Wade are moderated by knowledge. When developing survey items, we recommend researchers avoid ambiguities of abortion as a general construct, especially when public opinion measures on abortion are employed for research and the design of social and health policy and practice.

Gender and Women's Studies

the abortion-related attitudinal question. An early study on measuring abortion in surveys of U.S. women analyzed three major surveys-National Survey of Family Growth, National Surveys of Young Women and National Longitudinal Surveys of Work Experience of Youthand found that the self-reported abortion was highly deficient, especially among nonwhite women (Jones & Forrest, 1992). In a survey conducted in Mexico, Lara, Strickler, Olavarrieta, & Ellertson (2004) tested four data collection modes,

Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 2022

Introduction: Although much work has been done on US abortion ideology, less is known relative to the psychological processes that distinguish personal abortion beliefs or how those beliefs are communicated to others. As part of a forthcoming probability-based sampling designed study on US abortion climate, we piloted a study with a controlled sample to determine whether psychological indicators guiding abortion beliefs can be meaningfully extracted from qualitative interviews using natural language processing (NLP) substring matching. Of particular interest to this study is the presence of cognitive distortions-markers of rigid thinking-spoken during interviews and how cognitive distortion frequency may be tied to rigid, or firm, abortion beliefs. Methods: We ran qualitative interview transcripts against two lexicons. The first lexicon, the cognitive distortion schemata (CDS), was applied to identify cognitive distortion n-grams (a series of words) embedded within the qualitative interviews. The second lexicon, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), was applied to extract other psychological indicators, including the degrees of (1) analytic thinking, (2) emotional reasoning, (3) authenticity, and (4) clout. Results: People with polarized abortion views (i.e., strongly supportive of or opposed to abortion) had the highest observed usage of CDS n-grams, scored highest on authenticity, and lowest on analytic thinking. By contrast, people with moderate or uncertain abortion views (i.e., people holding more complex or nuanced views of abortion) spoke with the least CDS n-grams and scored slightly higher on analytic thinking. Discussion and conclusion: Our findings suggest people communicate about abortion differently depending on their personal abortion ideology. Those with strong abortion views may be more likely to communicate with authoritative words and patterns of words indicative of cognitive distortions-or limited complexity in belief systems. Those with moderate views are more likely to speak in conflicting terms and patterns of words that are flexible and open to change-or high complexity in belief systems. These findings suggest it is possible to extract psychological indicators with NLP from qualitative interviews about abortion. Findings from this study will help refine our protocol ahead of full-study launch.

Demography, 1994

This paper presents results of a validation survey of abortion conducted in Tallinn, Estonia in April and May 1992. The sample was drawn from patient records in a maternity hospital. Women who had an abortion in that hospital in 1991 were asked about recent abortions as part of a survey about women's health. More than 80% of the respondents reported having a recent abortion. Some respondents misreported their abortion as a miscarriage. Moreover, some variation in reporting was associated with respondents' characteristics. Ethnic Estonians were less likely to report their abortion than were Russians, women over age 40 were less likely to report the abortion than younger women, and women who had the abortion late in the first trimester were less likely to report that abortion. There was some evidence that unmarried women were less likely than married women to report their abortion, and that women who had borne three or more children were less likely to report their abortion than women who had borne fewer children. These differences probably stem from the extent to which pregnancy or abortion is considered stigmatizing for women in different situations.

Michigan Law Review, 1979