CARE – Choices About Abortion CaRE Options
Abortion
Awarded 2022
Capturing tradeoffs in abortion care
Shelby Reed, PhD
Duke University
$297,067

The Preference Evaluation Research (PrefER) Group at the Duke Clinical Research Institute has partnered with providers from the Duke Family Planning Clinic, an academic collaborator, and community-based advocates to design a web-based survey to generate evidence on features associated with abortion-care options. The study will be designed to quantify the relative importance of various abortion-care features and to estimate maximum costs and levels of risk that individuals are will accept to obtain more desirable features of abortion care. The study will investigate whether people have systematically different preferences and how their preferences may be associated with age, gender identity, race, ethnicity, income, available resources, perceived state-level restrictions, and experience with abortion. During the first phase of the project, the research team will conduct focus groups with abortion-care providers, abortion-care advocates, and people who are considering abortion or have recently had an abortion to identify the abortion-related features that will be included in a discrete-choice experiment survey instrument. The instrument will be share it with research partners for feedback before conducting 10-15 pretest interviews to guide revisions before programming it for web-based administration. The PrefER group will work with Duke Recruitment Innovation Center to use social media and online search engines to recruit 400-500 women across the U.S. who are considering abortion. The PrefER group will analyze the data to quantify the relative importance of abortion-care features and acceptable tradeoffs among them. The research team will disseminate research findings with legislators, other advocacy groups, abortion-care providers, the media, and other audiences.