Updating A Time-Series of Survey Questions: The Case of Abortion Attitudes in the General Social Survey

Cowan, Sarah K., Michael Hout & Stuart Perrett*

Published in Sociological Methods & Research, 2022

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and anticipated future terms of debate. Then survey experts use this substantive input and their knowledge of existing measures to develop and pilot a large battery of new items. Third, researchers analyze the pilot data to select items for the survey of record. Finally, the items appear on the survey-of-record, available to the whole user community. Surveys-of-record have procedures for changing content that determine if the new items appear just once or become part of the core. We provide the example of developing new abortion attitude measures in the General Social Survey. Current questions ask whether abortion should be legal under varying circumstances. The new abortion items ask about morality, access, state policy, and interpersonal dynamics. They improve content and construct validity and add new insights into Americans' abortion attitudes.

Category: Abortion, Measurement, Public Opinion, Political Sociology

Alternative Estimates of Lifetime Prevalence Of Abortion from Indirect Survey Questioning Methods

Cowan, Sarah K., Lawrence Wu, Susanna Makela*, Paula England

Published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 48 (2016)

Abortion is a frequent medical procedure undergone by diverse women in the United States with profound demographic and political implications yet we do not know how many American women alive today have had abortions. We do not know this basic fact because women under-report their abortion histories in surveys. There are a number of well-established techniques to elicit more accurate survey responses to sensitive items. In this comment, we propose that lifetime prevalence estimates for abortion in the United States could be improved through use of these techniques, in particular the double list experiment. We report on a pilot double list experiment we conducted which shows promising results. We also provide unique formulae for determining the appropriate sample sizes needed to detect that the double list experiment has improved accuracy of estimates over those obtained from asking women directly whether they have had an abortion.

Category: Abortion, Measurement

Cohort Abortion Measures for the United States

Cowan, Sarah K.

Published in Population and Development Review 39(2), 2013

Demographers interested in abortion in the United States have thus far focused on cross-sectional and synthetic cohort measures, due to data availability. We now have cohorts that have completed their entire reproductive years after the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide. For women who are in the midst of their childbearing years at the conclusion of data collection, I apply the Lee-Carter forecasting technique – its first application in abortion research – to complete their age-specific abortion rates. Using true cohort measures reveals markedly different abortion experiences by cohort. I find stasis in the distribution of abortion by abortion order and the racial composition of abortion incidences. In addition to the substantive findings, cohort measures shift the focus of quantitative abortion research from incidence rates to women’s lives over their reproductive years.

Category: Abortion, Measurement

* indicates student co-author