Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Walter R. Schumm / This exploratory study examines abortion decision-making attitudes of
adolescents attending Roman Catholic schools. With a theoretical background using both
cognitive-developmental theory and moral development theory, this study investigated
adolescent abortion decision-making attitudes with a multi-part paper and pencil survey.
The first part of the Abortion Attitude Scale consisted of a combination of the
seven General Social Survey (GSS) abortion questions, intermingled with seven
additional author-devised abortion questions. The second part of the survey consisted of
sixteen reality-based scenarios, each containing a high or low level of four dimensions.
The dimensions consisted of the four most common reasons for abortion females wrote
about in their online written testimonies about their actual abortion experiences. The four
dimensions were determined after the author conducted a frequency count of reasons for
abortion originating from 87 testimonies from pro-choice web sites and 82 testimonies
from pro-life web sites, plus phone calls to 8 pro-choice agencies and phone calls to 8
pro-life agencies.
The Abortion Attitude Scale was offered to a convenience sample of 8th through
12th graders attending the Topeka, Kansas Catholic Schools, which includes five
elementary schools and one high school. Written parental consent and written student
ascent were required for students to be eligible to participate in the study. A total of 350
students participated.
The study’s six hypotheses explored whether or not the combined GSS and
author-devised abortion questions are unidimensional; whether or not interaction effects
exist among the four dimensions in each of the scenarios; and how the independent
variables of gender, age, ethnicity, and intrinsic religiosity may impact adolescents’
abortion attitudes.
Results suggest several conclusions. The GSS and author-devised abortion
questions are multidimensional. Regarding the four dimensions used in each of the
scenarios, there were interaction effects among the four dimensions. Whereas the
adolescent female participants in this study did appear to be less accepting of abortion
than the male participants, and the adolescents with higher intrinsic religiosity appeared
to be less accepting of abortion, the hypotheses regarding younger age and greater ethnic
diversity did not appear to lend support to adolescents being less accepting of abortion.
The findings thus appear to show that this study’s participants had complex attitudes
about abortion decision-making, and that these attitudes appear to be at least somewhat
situationally-dependent.
Implications for further studies are discussed, along with limitations and
conclusions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/379 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Crock, Rosemary J. |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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