Abortion Knowledge and Reproductive Autonomy Survey of Austrian University Students, 2023

750 students from Tyrol, Austria participated in a 2023 cross-sectional online survey assessing abortion knowledge, attitudes, and reproductive autonomy. The dataset includes 622 women and 128 men with a median age of 23 years, and responses cover sociodemographics, prior experiences, legal knowledge, and scores from the 14-item Reproductive Autonomy Scale. The study was authored by Bettina Böttcher and published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Correlating reproductive autonomy scores with abortion attitudes based on the Reproductive Autonomy Scale (RAS) scores mentioned.
• Analyzing differences in abortion law knowledge between medical, health, and non-health students as described in the results.
• Investigating perceived social taboo around abortion based on reported gender differences in perception.
• Modeling factors associated with liberal versus conservative positions on abortion using the collected sociodemographic and experiential variables.

Strengths

• Dataset is based on a survey of 750 participants, providing a substantive sample size for analysis.
• Includes specific, reported metrics such as that 49.7% knew abortion is legally regulated and 39.9% had used emergency contraception.
• Uses a validated instrument, the 14-item Reproductive Autonomy Scale (RAS), for measuring a key construct.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown, which limits suitability assessment and requires manual inspection after download.
• Geographic scope is limited to students in Tyrol, Austria, which may not be generalizable to other regions.
• The dataset is very small at 17.5 KB, indicating limited scope or that the primary data may be summarized within a document.

Provenance

Source

Bettina Böttcher via figshare.

Collection Method

Cross-sectional online survey conducted in 2023.

Time Range

2023

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-22 06:10:57; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Tyrol, Austria