Concepts and Measures in Abortion Research

​​This resource is from the Capacity Strengthening for Abortion Research in Nigeria (CSARN) project. The material was developed as teaching modules for project Fellows who are early-career abortion researchers in Nigeria.

This presentation introduces mainstream concepts in abortion research and how they can be measured, how to identify potential sources of abortion data, and how to combine contexts with other variables as data sources for generating measures of abortion concepts. The presentation covers basic abortion concepts and measurements/indicators, how to identify a good measure, and how to calculate numerators, denominators, and proportions when conceiving/ designing abortion research. The second part of the presentation focuses on abortion data sources and approaches, including the Health Facility Survey (HFS), Community-based Survey (CBS), Health Survey System (HSS), Health Professional Survey (HPS), and Survey of Informal Abortion Providers (SIAP).