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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
S. Marie Harvey, DrPH, Research Program on Women's Health, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, 1201 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1201, 541-346-4120, mharvey@oregon.uoregon.edu
Women in the United States seeking to terminate an early pregnancy now have a choice between medical and surgical abortion. The availability of medical abortifacients holds the promise of increasing access to abortion for women in the United States. In order to increase access, however, women must find the method acceptable. The development of an instrument that would assist health care providers in determining which characteristics of abortion methods are important to a woman would be helpful in matching women with a method that they find acceptable. This presentation describes the development and evaluation of the Abortion Attributes Questionnaire (AAQ), an instrument designed to assess the perceived importance of specific characteristics of abortion methods. Two abortion methods are examined - medical abortion and surgical abortion. Women receiving medical abortions (N=186) and those who were offered the option of a medical abortion but chose instead the surgical procedure, completed the AAQ before the abortion. To determine the characteristics women value in an abortion method, participants were asked to rate, on a 5-point scale, how important each of 21 characteristics would be “when choosing between surgical and medical abortion.” Analyses revealed that the AAQ consists of four factors and has good internal reliability and construct validity. The validity of the AAQ was established by contrasting the mean factor scores of women who chose medical abortions to those who chose surgical abortions. Additional findings and implications of the AAQ as an instrument for both clinical applications and basic research will be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Abortion, Reproductive Health
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.