Curving Normality

Can bad science lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the world we live in? “Of course it can“, we are inclined to think. And if so, can this have real-life consequences? Investigating these meta-questions is not as easy as it might seem, for it would require an exact manner to distinguish the good from the bad science, and it would require a subject that has been thoroughly investigated in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ways to compare the outcomes.

One such subject would be the vast amount of research done on the psychological consequences of undergoing an induced abortion. This heavily researched (and heavily debated!) subject focusses primarily on the questions whether or not a women has a higher chance of suffering from anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression, or (other) mental disorders caused by undergoing an induced abortion. The conclusions drawn in the vast literature on this basic question vary form an abortion having no consequences, to an abortion having a negative impact on the psychological well-being of a woman.

Recently, I have been giving some thought on what might constitute polarisation of attitudes. Especially, I’m interested in whether or not the debate on induced abortion in American society has become more polarised. The recent news on the presence and …

Can blogs help scientific research? Probably, but I’m sure to have found one that helps me in my own research. The research I’m currently working on is on attitudes towards induced abortion, and especially the polarisation of these attitudes in America.

The body of literature on this subject is vast and has interesting titles as ‘Culture Wars’, and ‘Before the Shooting Begins’. The Culture Wars hypothesis, proffered by Hunter, basically states that Americans’ attitudes have increasingly been formed by two diverging fundaments. One important aspect of the Culture Wars is the (strong) impact of religious doctrine on many Americans’ life.

To get a good feeling of what is going on in these ‘Culture Wars’, I try to read more than just academic literature. Besides newspapers and, of course, what the U.S. Presidential candidates state about abortion, I recently discovered a blog named ‘Dispatches from the Culture Wars’.

Building upon the paper written by Jelen et al. (1993) that I wrote about a few days ago, I’d like to bring to your attention a more recent paper by Dutch researchers. It also addresses attitudes toward abortion in Western Europe, but does so in a rather more advanced manner.

As might be expected from an article written 15 years later, much developments have been made in the research on public opinion regarding induced abortion, both on a theoretical level, as well as on a methodological level. Let’s take a look at the outcomes of those improvements.