| dc.description.abstract | The attitudes about abortion held by 390 under graduate students were investigated. Three hypotheses were formulated for testing: (1) there is no significant difference between the attitudes of religious and non-religious students; (2) there is no significant difference between the attitudes of students with experience with abortion and those having no experience; (3) there is no significant difference between the attitudes of students reporting political involvement with the issue of elective abortion, and those reporting noninvolvement.Two instruments, the Abortion Attitude Scale (AAS), and the Demographic Questionnaire were used. The AAS was a Likert-type summed rating scale with a range from 30, very disapproving to 150, very approving and a reliability of .91. The demographic questionnaire measured the variables of sex, religiosity, experience with abortion, and political involvement with the issue of elective abortion. An analysis of variance was performed to measure the variance due to sex, religiosity, and experience with abortion. Main effects, two-way interaction effects, and a three-way interaction of sex, religiosity and abortion experience were analyzed. The level of significance was set at < .05 and p < .01 levels, and null hypotheses 1 and 2 were rejected. No interactive effects were found to be significant. The mean of the entire sample was 96.13, slightly above the midpoint. This would indicate that the level of support for elective abortion by college students has decreased from past levels of support. These findings confirmed results of several earlier studies, which indicated that sex did not influence attitudes about abortion, whereas religiosity and experience with abortion did. Future research could probably be aimed at determining what specific factors are more strongly related to attitudes about abortion, and to determining whether most individuals feel the issue to be important. | en_US |
