Participants
In this part of the study was reported that the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants. According to this. Two hundred and twenty-nine participants agreed to volunteer for this study. The sample was 33.6% male (n = 77) and 66.4% female (n =152). Students enrolled in a course during the spring semesters of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Our sample academic grade consisted of 20.1% freshman (n = 46), 22.7% sophomore (n = 52), 31.0% junior (n = 71) and 26.2 % senior (n = 60). See Appendix A.
Materials and Procedure
The data comes from surveys completed by N = 229 students enrolled in a data analysis course during the spring semesters of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. All students enrolled in the course during those semesters were invited to complete a questionnaire and almost all did. The data was provided by the instructor of those courses. While this represents a non-random sample, assume randomization occurred.
The questionnaire involving questions on socio-demographical characteristics (gender and academic level) and furthermore, the students were asked to state if they agree/not agree on 6 abortion-related statements were used to collect the data. See Appendix B.
In the questionnaire, participants were asked six questions about their opinion of when the abortion should be legal. The main aim of these questions are that try to measure students’ attitudes towards abortion. Each question has two options, “Yes” and “No”, each of them has a value of 0 or 1. If students respond positively to the questions, they receive a value of 1, and if they answer negatively, they have a value of 0. The answers for each of these questions were then summed to compose a general abortion Attitudes score. The Abortion index score has the lowest value of 0 and the highest value of 6. Lower scores from the abortion index means negative attitude towards the abortion while the higher scores (6) reflect more supports every field about abortion.
Abortion is considered one of the most difficult problems in bioethics. The debate on abortion is not only confined to scientists and medicines, but also discussed in many other institutions such as churches and religious organizations, civil servants and civil servant candidates, and the general public, in short, everyone has chosen a position on abortion in the U.S.A. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 Roe v. Since Wade’s decision, political, legal, social and ethical debates have never diminished. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between gender-Academic level and students’ attitudes towards legalizing abortion.
We would expect that women evaluate this situation better than men because women an easily empathize with this. On the other hand, the academic level of the students may be influential in abortion attitudes because of experiences. The data were analyzed with SPSS Statistical Software Package, using descriptive statistics, independent t-test, and ANOVA.
Results
The table shows that 86.5% (n=198) of the students who participated in the questionnaire said that they could have an abortion if the woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy. This condition was the most favored state of abortion approved by students. On the other hand, 29.7% (n=68) of the students asked that women should be allowed to have an abortion when they do not married and do not want to get married. This condition was the least willing to allow legal abortion. See Appendix C.
The basic analysis used for reliability analysis is to find the Cronbach Alpha (?) value. There may be a single ? value for each item, or an ? value for all questions. The ? value obtained for all the questions indicates the total reliability of the questionnaire and is expected to be greater than 0.7, the lower ? values indicate that the questionnaire has poor reliability, and ?> 0.8 indicates that the questionnaire has high reliability. In our study, we calculate 0.846 which means that our items is “good” and reliable. After all, we found the overall score by collecting all items. See Appendix D.
Descriptive statistics of how many of the 6 items indicated for abortion were approved by students participating in the study are shown. It seems that students approve 3 of 6 items on average (M=3.30. SD=2.00). The standard deviation of 2.00 shows that the individual responses, on average, were a little over 2 point away from the mean. See Appendix E.
The independent-samples t-test compares the means between two unrelated groups (gender) on the continuous dependent variable (abortion attitudes index score). We found that there is no a statistically significant difference between the mean number of in which abortion should be legal recalled for male and female conditions t(227) =-0.083, p < .05. Since our group statistics box revealed that the mean for the male condition (M = 3.29, SD = 1.99) was as much as same the mean for the female condition (M = 3.31, SD = 2.01). See Appendix F
For our second main analysis, The use of a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a significant effect of academic level on abortion attitudes F(3,225)=4.695, p
