This study has developed and tested a model to explain the abortion standards of single women. A sample of 263 college women was used to test the two hypotheses proposed by the model. The findings show support for Hypothesis I that abortion permissiveness and premarital sexual permissiveness are positively associated for single women. This association is not significantly affected by either the controls of age or religion. Hypothesis II, which proposed a positive relationship between abortion permissiveness and number of times in love, is supported when age is controlled but not when religion is introduced as a control. Specifically, the failure of this hypothesis results from the fact that Catholics in the sample have been in love less and score lower on abortion permissiveness than non-Catholics.
Additional findings of the study include successful development of a 13-item Guttman scale to measure standards for acceptance of abortion. This concept, as operationalized by the scale items, measures a concern for the social consequences of premarital pregnancy and childbirth. A serendipitous finding of the study is that the Reiss premarital sexual permissiveness scale failed to perform in the anticipated manner. This suggests the need to revise the Reiss scale so that it incorporates changes in premarital sexual standards. / M.S.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104512 |
| Date | January 1971 |
| Creators | Hammer, Elizabeth L. |
| Contributors | Sociology |
| Publisher | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | v, 73 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 20429399 |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds