A measure of attitudes toward abortion

Abstract

An effort was made to construct an effective questionnaire for examining group and individual differences in attitudes toward abortion in view of the fact that most studies on abortion are based on responses to instruments of questionable reliability which often reflect the bias of the reporter. From an initial pool of 100 statement items about abortion and related topics the questionnaire after a testing was whittled down to 55 items. 9 were from inventories used in previous studies; 5 were information items and 5 were lie scale pairs. Reliability was determined by comparing the first 27 with the last 28 items. A Pearsonian correlation coefficient of .90 was obtained. Groups were selected to reflect the variables of education age and marital status all of which have been shown to influence attitudes toward abortion. Accordingly the questionnaire was administered to a group of unmarried students assembly-line workers and physicians wives. As was expected a younger age higher cultural level lack of religious conviction and positive marital status werw associated with a more favorable attitude toward abortion. When the 9 items used in previous studies were correlated with responses to the new items a correlation coefficient of .48 was obtained indicating concurrent validity.