DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15320056
title: A Reproductive Health Survey of Canadian Women

description: Materials and Methods

A questionnaire into the prevalence and effects of pregnancy loss, abortion and problematic pregnancies was created in consultation with experts in abortion and mental health research.

The survey instrument was designed using the LimeSurvey v6.10.4 open-source software and hosted by the LimeSurvey.org platform.

Respondents were recruited through Cint.com, a digital marketing and social sciences research firm with access to a worldwide population of 335 million survey panelists, of which 2.2 million reside in Canada. Cint panelists complete surveys in exchange for small rewards with a value. For this survey, the total cost was $2 per completed survey.

Between January 16th and the 20th of 2024, Cint serially distributed electronic invitations to a random subset of Cint’s Canadian panelists who were identified as most likely being females 41 and 45 years of age. Once 1000 completed responses were obtained, no more invitations were released but responses continued to be recorded until no more were returned.

The invitations to participate did not disclose the survey topic, but the consent form electronically signed by respondents did disclose that the survey might include “sensitive” subject matter.

Study design and setting

The survey instrument is completely defined in this repository by the LimeSurvey file “limesurvey_CanadianCint_code.lss”.  A readable representation of this file is shown in “Canadian Cint Panel Questionnaire Export.pdf.”  Note that the question skip patterns, which can be clearly seen in the lss file, are not represented in the pdf file.

No identifying information was collected. The responses are in the repository in the file “Canada data repository.csv”.  The consent form and disclosure statements provided by Cint to all respondents is in the repository file “Cint Consent.pdf”.

A large portion of the items in this questionnaire used visual analog sliding scales. Respondents saw the scale with labels for the right and left of the line and a sliding button that could be moved to either the extreme left, the extreme right, or anywhere in between. The position selected was proportionately converted into numeric scores from 0 to 100.  The number value was not displayed to the respondent. The respondent only saw the position of the button on the line.

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate: All participants were adults who provided electronically signed informed consent to complete a survey that could involve sensitive topics. No personal identifying information was collected. All procedures adhered to the ethical standards of applicable national and institutional research committees and conformed to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (1975, revised 2008). The study protocol was reviewed and approved by Sterling Institutional Review Board (IRB ID: 10225; July 18, 2022).

Principal Investigator:  David C. Reardon, Elliot Institute

Consent for publication: not applicable.

Funding: Alliance for Life Ontario and Charlotte Lozier Institute. Neither funding party participated in the design, analysis or interpretation of the results, or writing or submission of the manuscript.

Data Availability Statement: Data are available in this repository under the terms of “ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en” Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC 4.0).

Software availability statement: LimeSurvey is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and available from LiveSurvey.org at https://community.limesurvey.org/downloads/.