What Can Conjoint Experiments Tell Us about Americans’ Abortion Attitudes?

Doherty, David

doi:10.1177/1532673x211053211

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…We think this is a worthwhile trade‐off given the difficulty of making causal inferences from observational data. But it would be interesting to see if similar dynamics emerge in other policy areas, including other torts, such as routine auto accident, slip‐and‐fall, and medical malpractice cases, and using other methods, including conjoint experiments (see Doherty, 2022) designed to assess how different dimensions and attributes of claimants, levels of fault, defendants and levels of claim exhaustion might shape attitudes toward claims.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries

Barnes,

Hevron,

Menounou

2023

Law Soc Rev

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Despite some retrenchment, the litigation state remains alive and well. All this litigation has engendered intense debates over whether increased lawsuits represent a rising tide of justice or a flood of frivolous claims. Tort law has been at the center of these debates for decades, standing at the fault line between “tort tale,” “total justice,” and “mixed” narratives about the perils and benefits of litigation. In this article, we use a survey experiment to probe attitudes toward claims for workplace injuries in light of these narratives. We find that our participants held multifaceted views. On one hand, they favored making claims over doing nothing or asking family members for help and saw lawsuits as equally appropriate as filing a government claim or hiring a lawyer to send a demand letter. On the other hand, tort tale themes cast a subtle shadow over our participants' views. When told claimants did not rush to the courts in defiance of tort tale expectations, our participants saw the lawsuit as more justified. Indeed, the more remedies exhausted prior to litigation, the more justifiable the lawsuit seemed, even though repeated denials of claims might undermine faith in their merits. The bottom line, we contend, is that attitudes toward litigation reflect not only the choice of remedy but also how remedies are used, even when the underlying claim is meritorious—a point that could be useful to practitioners and advocates as they weigh claiming options as well as litigation and public communication strategies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries

Barnes,

Hevron,

Menounou

2023

Law Soc Rev

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“…These circumstances include, for example, the gestation period of pregnancy [ 6 ], the context for seeking abortion [ 7 ], and whether people consider abortion as a legal versus moral issue [ 8 ]. In addition, attitudes toward abortion also vary across some demographic characteristics such as age, educational attainment, political affiliation, and race or ethnicity of a person or groups of people participating in a survey [ 1 , 9 , 10 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Reddit Forums Specific to Abortion That Yield Diverse Dialogues Pertaining to Medical Information Seeking and Personal Worldviews: Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Comparative Study

Valdez,

Mena-Meléndez,

Crawford

et al. 2024

J Med Internet Res

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Background Attitudes toward abortion have historically been characterized via dichotomized labels, yet research suggests that these labels do not appropriately encapsulate beliefs on abortion. Rather, contexts, circumstances, and lived experiences often shape views on abortion into more nuanced and complex perspectives. Qualitative data have also been shown to underpin belief systems regarding abortion. Social media, as a form of qualitative data, could reveal how attitudes toward abortion are communicated publicly in web-based spaces. Furthermore, in some cases, social media can also be leveraged to seek health information. Objective This study applies natural language processing and social media mining to analyze Reddit (Reddit, Inc) forums specific to abortion, including r/Abortion (the largest subreddit about abortion) and r/AbortionDebate (a subreddit designed to discuss and debate worldviews on abortion). Our analytical pipeline intends to identify potential themes within the data and the affect from each post. Methods We applied a neural network–based topic modeling pipeline (BERTopic) to uncover themes in the r/Abortion (n=2151) and r/AbortionDebate (n=2815) subreddits. After deriving the optimal number of topics per subreddit using an iterative coherence score calculation, we performed a sentiment analysis using the Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner to assess positive, neutral, and negative affect and an emotion analysis using the Text2Emotion lexicon to identify potential emotionality per post. Differences in affect and emotion by subreddit were compared. Results The iterative coherence score calculation revealed 10 topics for both r/Abortion (coherence=0.42) and r/AbortionDebate (coherence=0.35). Topics in the r/Abortion subreddit primarily centered on information sharing or offering a source of social support; in contrast, topics in the r/AbortionDebate subreddit centered on contextualizing shifting or evolving views on abortion across various ethical, moral, and legal domains. The average compound Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner scores for the r/Abortion and r/AbortionDebate subreddits were 0.01 (SD 0.44) and −0.06 (SD 0.41), respectively. Emotionality scores were consistent across the r/Abortion and r/AbortionDebate subreddits; however, r/Abortion had a marginally higher average fear score of 0.36 (SD 0.39). Conclusions Our findings suggest that people posting on abortion forums on Reddit are willing to share their beliefs, which manifested in diverse ways, such as sharing abortion stories including how their worldview changed, which critiques the value of dichotomized abortion identity labels, and information seeking. Notably, the style of discourse varied significantly by subreddit. r/Abortion was principally leveraged as an information and outreach source; r/AbortionDebate largely centered on debating across various legal, ethical, and moral abortion domains. Collectively, our findings suggest that abortion remains an opaque yet politically charged issue for people and that social media can be leveraged to understand views and circumstances surrounding abortion.

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“…These circumstances include, for example, the gestation period of pregnancy [6], the context for seeking abortion [7], and whether people consider abortion as a legal versus moral issue [8]. In addition, attitudes toward abortion also vary across some demographic characteristics such as age, educational attainment, political affiliation, and race or ethnicity of a person or groups of people participating in a survey [1,9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Reddit Forums Specific to Abortion That Yield Diverse Dialogues Pertaining to Medical Information Seeking and Personal Worldviews: Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Comparative Study (Preprint)

Valdez¹,

Mena-Meléndez²,

Crawford³

2023

Preprint

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BACKGROUND Abortion attitudes have historically been dichotomized labels, yet research suggests these labels do not appropriately encapsulate abortion beliefs. Qualitative data has also been shown to underpin belief systems about abortion. Social media, as a form of qualitative data, could reveal how abortion attitudes depart from the dichotomy. OBJECTIVE This study applies Natural Language Processing and social media mining to analyze Reddit forums specific to abortion, including to identify potential themes within the data and predict affect from each post. METHODS We applied the following methods to analyze and visualize (n=5,128) posts scraped from Reddit: (1) term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) calculations (to assess term frequency), (2) k-means clustering (to group like words and phrases into themes), and (3) principal components analysis (PCA) (to visualize our data). We also applied a sentiment analysis to determine affect in our data. RESULTS Our analyses revealed six clusters: (1) Complex Abortion Beliefs (n=1,566); (2) Abortion Decision Making (n=1,162); (3) Defining Abortion Identity Labels (1,022); (4) Medication Abortion (n=746); (5) Asking for Advice (n=604); and (6) Reddit Forum Rules and Regulations (n=38). Sentiment scores were negative, indicating poor affect. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest people posting on Reddit abortion forums are willing to share their beliefs, which manifested in diverse ways including sharing one’s abortion story (and how their worldview changed), critiquing the value of dichotomized abortion identity labels, and information seeking. Collectively, our findings suggest abortion views do not always align with pro-choice and pro-life labels but mired in complexity.

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What Can Conjoint Experiments Tell Us about Americans’ Abortion Attitudes?

Cited by 6 publications

References 52 publications

Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries

Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries

Analyzing Reddit Forums Specific to Abortion That Yield Diverse Dialogues Pertaining to Medical Information Seeking and Personal Worldviews: Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Comparative Study

Analyzing Reddit Forums Specific to Abortion That Yield Diverse Dialogues Pertaining to Medical Information Seeking and Personal Worldviews: Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Comparative Study (Preprint)

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