Publication Date
5-1-2020
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
PLoS ONE
Volume
15
Issue
5
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0232154
Abstract
To address pervasive measurement biases in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) research, our interdisciplinary team created an affirming, customizable electronic survey to measure experiences with contraceptive use, pregnancy, and abortion for transgender and gender nonbinary people assigned female or intersex at birth and cisgender sexual minority women. Between May 2018 and April 2019, we developed a questionnaire with 328 items across 10 domains including gender identity; language used for sexual and reproductive anatomy and events; gender affirmation process history; sexual orientation and sexual activity; contraceptive use and preferences; pregnancy history and desires; abortion history and preferences; priorities for sexual and reproductive health care; family building experiences; and sociodemographic characteristics. Recognizing that the words people use for their sexual and reproductive anatomy can vary, we programmed the survey to allow participants to input the words they use to describe their bodies, and then used those customized words to replace traditional medical terms throughout the survey. This process-oriented paper aims to describe the rationale for and collaborative development of an affirming, customizable survey of the SRH needs and experiences of sexual and gender minorities, and to present summary demographic characteristics of 3,110 people who completed the survey. We also present data on usage of customizable words, and offer the full text of the survey, as well as code for programming the survey and cleaning the data, for others to use directly or as guidelines for how to measure SRH outcomes with greater sensitivity to gender diversity and a range of sexual orientations.
Funding Number
K23DA039800
Funding Sponsor
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Psychology
Recommended Citation
Heidi Moseson, Mitchell R. Lunn, Anna Katz, Laura Fix, Mary Durden, Ari Stoeffler, Jen Hastings, Lyndon Cudlitz, Eli Goldberg, Bori Lesser-Lee, Laz Letcher, Aneidys Reyes, Annesa Flentje, Matthew R. Capriotti, Micah E. Lubensky, and Juno Obedin-Maliver. "Development of an affirming and customizable electronic survey of sexual and reproductive health experiences for transgender and gender nonbinary people" PLoS ONE (2020). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232154
Comments
This is the Version of Record and can also be read online here.