abortion {lcca}R Documentation

Abortion attitudes from the General Social Survey

Description

This dataset, which was extracted from the 2006 General Social Survey, reports the responses of adults in the United States to six questions about legalized abortion. The questions began, “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if...”

Usage

abortion

Format

a data frame with 4510 rows and 8 variables:

SEX

respondent's sex (factor with two levels)

ABANY

“...The woman wants it for any reason?” (factor with five levels)

ABDEFECT

“...If there is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby?” (factor with five levels)

ABHLTH

“...If the woman's own health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy?” (factor with five levels)

ABNOMORE

“...If she is married and does not want any more children?” (factor with five levels)

ABPOOR

“...If the family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children?” (factor with five levels)

ABRAPE

“...If she became pregnant as a result of rape?” (factor with five levels)

WTSSNR

analytic weight adjusted for subsampling of initial nonrespondents (numeric)

Details

Because of the split half-sample design used in the 2006 GSS, only about half of the sampled adults were asked the abortion questions. The response code "NAP" (not applicable) indicates that the question was not asked. The other response codes are "YES", "NO" and "DK" (Don't know). A missing value (NA) indicates that the question was asked but no answer was given. Analysts should recode "NAP" to a missing value. Whether "DK" should be converted to a missing value is debatable.

Although the GSS has a complex multistage area sampling plan, it was designed to be self-weighting in the sense that every adult in the sample frame had an approximately equal chance of being selected. However, many sampled persons did not respond to the initial interview request. To help reduce nonresponse bias, a random sample of these nonrespondents were selected for aggressive followup attempts. Those who were successfully interviewed in this followup procedure ought to be assigned greater weight, because they need to represent those who were not selected for followup. The variable WTSSNR is a weight that adjusts for this nonresponse followup procedure, and the GSS documentation recommends that this weight be used in analyses.

Latent-class analyses of abortion questions from earlier GSS surveys were reported by McCutcheon (1987) and by McCutcheon and Nawojczyk (1987).

Source

Davis, J.A. and Smith, T. W. (2007) General Social Surveys, 1972-2006 (machine-readable data file). Chicago: National Opinion Research Center (producer). Storrs, CT: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut (distributor).

References

McCutcheon, A.L. (1987) Sexual morality, pro-life values, and attitudes toward abortion: a simultaneous latent structure analysis for 1978-1983. Sociological Methods and Research, 16, 256-275.

McCutcheon, A.L. and Nawojczyk, M. (1995) Making the break: popular sentiment toward legalized abortion among American and Polish Catholic laities. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 7, 232-252.

For example analyses of this dataset using functions in the LCCA package, see the manual LCCA Package for R, Version 1 in the subdirectory doc.


[Package lcca version 2.0.0 Index]