Do Pregnancy Intentions Matter? Revisiting Relationships With Pregnancy, Birth, and Maternal Outcomes

By: Nicholas Mark, & Sarah K. Cowan

Published in: Demography (2022) 59 (1): 37–49.

Preventing unplanned or unintended pregnancies continues to be a cornerstone of American reproductive health policy and infrastructure, but the evidence that these pregnancies cause adverse maternal and child outcomes is limited. We test these relationships on recent large-scale data using inverse propensity weights estimated from generalized boosted models. Consistent with prior research, we find that pregnancy timing is related to maternal experience during pregnancy, but not to infant outcomes at birth. In an addition to the literature, we find evidence that pregnancy timing is relevant for a number of maternal outcomes, such as the onset of depression and intimate partner violence, changes in smoking behavior, and receipt of medical care. These findings suggest that policy intended to improve infant welfare by preventing unintended pregnancies has little empirical support, but that policy focused on increasing reproductive autonomy and maternal well-being has the potential to improve outcomes.

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

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

Published in: Sociological Methods & Research 53 (1), 193-234

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.

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Is the New Terrain for Political Division among Americans

By: Sarah K. Cowan, Nicholas Mark* & Jennifer A. Reich

Published in: Socius 7 (2021)

Politically conservative Americans are less likely than those who identify as liberal to report a willingness to get a vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019. Using data from the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Survey from November 2020 to February 2021, the authors find that this partisan divide in vaccine hesitancy has increased over time. Recent scholarship has suggested that these differences can be attributed to personal characteristics, including varying levels of trust in institutions. The authors find that although the data supported this hypothesis in mid-November, by early February differences in demographics, concern about the pandemic, and institutional trust no longer explained the partisan gap. The authors explain the deepening divide by turning to recent evidence that political party affiliation has become a source of identity that shapes personal decision making.