Discordant benevolence: How and why people help others in the face of conflicting values

By: Sarah K. Cowan, Tricia C. Bruce, Brea L. Perry, Bridget Ritz*, Stuart Perrett* & Elizabeth M. Anderson*

Published in: Science Advances 8 (7), 2022

What happens when a request for help from friends or family members invokes conflicting values? In answering this question, we integrate and extend two literatures: support provision within social networks and moral decision-making. We examine the willingness of Americans who deem abortion immoral to help a close friend or family member seeking one. Using data from the General Social Survey and 74 in-depth interviews from the National Abortion Attitudes Study, we find that a substantial minority of Americans morally opposed to abortion would enact what we call discordant benevolence: providing help when doing so conflicts with personal values. People negotiate discordant benevolence by discriminating among types of help and by exercising commiseration, exemption, or discretion. This endeavor reveals both how personal values affect social support processes and how the nature of interaction shapes outcomes of moral decision-making.

Updating A Time-Series of Survey Questions: The Case of Abortion Attitudes in the General Social Survey

By: Sarah K. Cowan, Michael Hout, & Stuart Perrett*

Published in: Sociological Methods & Research 53 (1), 193-234

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and anticipated future terms of debate. Then survey experts use this substantive input and their knowledge of existing measures to develop and pilot a large battery of new items. Third, researchers analyze the pilot data to select items for the survey of record. Finally, the items appear on the survey-of-record, available to the whole user community. Surveys-of-record have procedures for changing content that determine if the new items appear just once or become part of the core. We provide the example of developing new abortion attitude measures in the General Social Survey. Current questions ask whether abortion should be legal under varying circumstances. The new abortion items ask about morality, access, state policy, and interpersonal dynamics. They improve content and construct validity and add new insights into Americans' abortion attitudes.

Enacted Abortion Stigma in the United States

By: Sarah K. Cowan

Published in: Social Science and Medicine 177 (2017)

Rationale: Abortion is a common medical procedure at the center of political debate. Yet, abortion stigma at the individual level is under-researched; the nascent research on abortion stigma has not yet documented experienced (enacted) stigma instead capturing anticipated or internalized stigma.

Objective: This study documents how women and men who disclosed abortions perceived others’ reactions and determinants of those perceptions.

Method: The study uses the American Miscarriage and Abortion Communication Survey, a survey representative of American-resident adults. Data from the sub-sample who had personal experience with abortion were analyzed (total sample, N = 1640; abortion disclosure sub-sample, n = 179). The survey captured each disclosure of the most recent abortion. Respondents had eight possible choices for articulating how the listener reacted. Cluster analyses grouped these reactions. Multinomial logistic regression identified predictors of the perceived reactions. Ordinal logistic regression revealed which disclosers perceived exclusively negative reactions, exclusively positive reactions, and a mix of negative and positive reactions.

Results: Each disclosure fell into one of three clusters: negative reaction, supportive reaction or sympathetic reaction. The majority of abortion disclosures received largely positive reactions (32.6% were characterized as supportive and 40.6% were characterized as sympathetic). A substantial minority of disclosures received a negative reaction (26.8%). The perceived valence of the reaction is predicted, in part, by to whom the disclosure was made and why. Across all their disclosures, most people disclosing an abortion history perceived only positive reactions (58.3%). A substantial minority of people perceived either exclusively negative reactions (7.6%) or a mix of negative and positive reactions (34.1%). Ordinal logistic regression (with people as the unit of analysis) showed perceived reactions are predicted by the number of disclosures made and the revealer’s race and income.

Conclusion: Whereas most people disclosing an abortion received support or sympathy, a substantial minority received stigmatizing reactions, which plausibly negatively impact on health.

This research was covered in Glamour.