Jackson Heide M, Rendall Michael S
Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland College Park.
Department of Sociology and Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland College Park.
Popul Res Policy Rev. 2025 Feb;44(1). doi: 10.1007/s11113-024-09925-z. Epub 2024 Dec 14.
Limited data are available on the characteristics and outcomes both of people who have and who have not had an abortion. Administrative data sources contain information on aggregate abortion counts and some demographic characteristics describing individuals who had an abortion but not on those who did not have an abortion. They are therefore of limited use for analyzing the characteristics, reproductive behaviors, and attitudes associated with abortion risk. Direct questions in population representative surveys yield downwardly biased estimates of abortion and likely differential underreporting of abortion by socio-demographic characteristics. In the present study, we evaluate the effectiveness of an indirect survey method, the list experiment, for improving estimates of abortion risk and differentials in population-representative surveys. We estimate cumulative-lifetime abortion incidence in 2017 and five-year incidence in 2021 using two cross-sectional surveys administered in Delaware and Maryland and evaluate the five-year estimates against external benchmarks from administrative data. We use multivariate regression with the list-experiment data to examine abortion incidence by socio-demographic predictors. We find that list-experiment estimates of five-year abortion incidence are similar to estimates calculated from external data: that cumulative lifetime abortion incidence increases monotonically with age, and that five-year incidence is inverse U-shaped. Black adults are found to be much more likely to have had an abortion both in the past five-years and over the reproductive lifetime, before and after controlling for age, parity, relationship status, education, and household income. We conclude positively about the validity and utility of the list experiment method.
关于有过堕胎经历和没有过堕胎经历的人群的特征及结果，现有数据有限。行政数据源包含堕胎总数信息以及一些描述堕胎者的人口统计学特征，但不包括未堕胎者的信息。因此，它们在分析与堕胎风险相关的特征、生殖行为和态度方面用途有限。在具有人口代表性的调查中直接提问会导致对堕胎情况的估计偏低，而且不同社会人口特征的堕胎情况可能存在差异漏报。在本研究中，我们评估了一种间接调查方法——列表实验，在改善具有人口代表性的调查中对堕胎风险及差异的估计方面的有效性。我们使用在特拉华州和马里兰州进行的两项横断面调查，估计2017年的累计终生堕胎发生率和2021年的五年堕胎发生率，并根据行政数据的外部基准评估五年估计值。我们使用列表实验数据进行多元回归，以研究社会人口预测因素与堕胎发生率之间的关系。我们发现，列表实验对五年堕胎发生率的估计与根据外部数据计算的估计值相似：累计终生堕胎发生率随年龄单调增加，五年发生率呈倒U形。在控制了年龄、生育次数、恋爱状况、教育程度和家庭收入之后，发现黑人成年人在过去五年以及整个生育期内堕胎的可能性要高得多。我们对列表实验方法的有效性和实用性得出了肯定的结论。
