APHA 2020

Montenegro, M., Marcantonio, T., Valdez, D., Turner, R.C, Jozkowski, K.N., Crawford, B., Lo, W.J.(2020, October). Examining Latinx and non-Latinx support and opposition toward abortion laws in the US. American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting. 

Background: Previous research suggests that compared with other ethnic/racial groups, Latinx people tend to have the least supportive attitudes toward abortion more generally. However, how Latinx attitudes compare with other racial/ethnic subgroups in their support or opposition to abortion laws remains understudied. This study compares Latinx and non-Latinx attitudes toward restrictive and supportive abortion laws in the US.

Method: We administered a web-based pilot survey to English and Spanish-speaking self-identified US Latinx (n = 101) and non-Latinx (n =101) adults. Participants were asked about their support/opposition for restrictive and supportive abortion laws. We used Poisson regression to assess if there were associations between Latinx and non-Latinx in their support/opposition for abortion laws. We included several demographic variables as covariates (e.g., religious attendance, identifying as pro-life/pro-choice, place of residence).

Results: There were no significant differences in support for restrictive or supportive laws based on ethnicity/race (ps > .685). Our sample had similar support (e.g., high support for a restrictive law requiring doctors to inform women about abortion alternatives; high support for a supportive law requiring protestors to be a certain distance from clinics). Unsurprisingly, attending religious services frequently and identifying as pro-life was associated with less support for supportive laws and more support for restrictive ones.

Conclusion: Our findings support research that indicates Latinx views toward socially contentious issues do not differ significantly from non-Latinx persons. We recommend researchers assess the extent that people understand the nuances of currently, potentially complicated abortion laws to determine if people understand their application.

Valdez, D., Montenegro, M., *Marcantonio, T.M., Crawford, B.L., & Jozkowski, K.N. (2020, October). #abortion and #roevwade in the wake of Justice Kavanaugh: Insights from archived social media data from May-August 2018. American Public Health Association Annual Meeting.

2.65 billion people use social media regularly, creating public domain data comprised of trillions of social media posts. Such data is minable for insights into public health issues—particularly contentious ones such as abortion, that have historically divided US public opinion. This study uses social media archives to examine abortion attitudes before, during, and after the nomination and appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. Data were collected using a social media repository containing over 100 billion Twitter posts collected from 2017-present. We restricted our query to only collect feeds that contained #abortion or #roevwade from May through August 2018. We classified and coded these data into themes using machine-learning methods. Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court yielded sharp increases in the use of #abortion and #roevwade on Twitter, which continued until after his confirmation. Several themes emerged from the content (e.g., advocacy, anti-abortion rhetoric, pro-abortion rhetoric, religion), suggesting divided opinions about Kavanaugh and his Supreme Court appointment. Also, data were generally negative, with substantial volumes of either anti-abortion or anti-Kavanaugh content. Social media represents a source of information that can be mined for insights into contentious issues. The nomination and confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh led to increased social media activity that underscored the divisive nature of abortion as a public health issue and reproductive right. More work is needed to explore the intersection of survey development and machine learning methods to analyze complex health issues.