Social network–based data collection methods that rely on third‐party reporting have emerged as a promising approach for measuring abortion in restrictive settings. In order for these methods to accurately measure abortion incidence, they must also assess the visibility of abortions within social networks. Failure to do so may result in estimates affected by transmission bias, caused by imperfect knowledge of all abortions within one's social network. In this paper, we present exploratory research that uses respondent‐driven sampling (RDS) and the game of contacts method to measure abortion visibility in four sites in Uganda and Ethiopia. We assess the existence of potential biases in the game of contacts estimate of abortion visibility in each site by conducting several internal and external validity tests. While these tests provided some promising results, other factors such as the representativeness of the RDS samples, direct versus indirect abortion knowledge transfers, and the generalizability of the study sites may have introduced biases into the final estimates of abortion visibility in this study. We conclude by making recommendations on how applications of this methodology could be improved to better estimate abortion‐related transmission bias.

中文翻译：

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使用联系人游戏估计乌干达和埃塞俄比亚堕胎的社会可见度


依赖第三方报告的基于社交网络的数据收集方法已成为在限制性环境中衡量堕胎的一种很有前途的方法。为了使这些方法准确衡量堕胎率，它们还必须评估堕胎在社交网络中的可见性。如果不这样做，可能会导致估计值受到传播偏倚的影响，这是由于对社交网络中所有堕胎的了解不完全造成的。在本文中，我们提出了探索性研究，该研究使用受访者驱动抽样 （RDS） 和接触游戏方法来衡量乌干达和埃塞俄比亚四个地点的堕胎可见性。我们通过进行几次内部和外部有效性测试来评估每个站点的堕胎可见性的联系人估计游戏中是否存在潜在偏差。虽然这些测试提供了一些有希望的结果，但其他因素，如 RDS 样本的代表性、直接与间接流产知识转移以及研究地点的普遍性，可能在本研究中对流产可见度的最终估计中引入了偏差。最后，我们就如何改进该方法的应用以更好地估计与流产相关的传播偏倚提出了建议。