#self-selection

[tubal-facts]

1 in 4 patients who have a sterilization consultation ultimately undergo a sterilization procedure.

The CDC's National Survey of Family Growth found that about 1 in 4 patients who undergo a sterilization consultation ultimately undergo a sterilization procedure.

Consultation refers to an appointment with a doctor to discuss sterilization procedures. Scheduling and attending a consultation already reflects a degree of commitment to the decision to be sterilized.

In the 12 months prior to the study, among subjects of all ages with 0 births, 1.3% had undergone sterilization consultation and 0.3% had undergone a sterilization procedure (pg 126 (138 in the PDF)). This means that approximately 4 times as many subjects underwent sterilization consultation as underwent a sterilization procedure. The other three-quarters did not follow through with a sterilization procedure.

Source:

CDC (US) National Survey of Family Growth: Fertility, family planning, and reproductive health of U.S. women; data from the 2002 national survey of family growth - Pub. 2005 (n = 61,561)

How many of our readers follow through?

With respect to this website and other online discussions, it's more difficult to answer the question, but we can make an estimate.

Though we get a number of questions through our website and see many posts asking about surgery post-op experiences, side effects, recovery periods, etc., we know from messages we've gotten and from follow-up tracking that the vast majority of people who ask questions about sterilization don't ultimately follow through with a procedure. It may be surprising to readers, but based on our data, users who choose to postpone sterilization indefinitely are much more common than users who follow through. Also, our team receives far more questions about sterilization than stories of actual sterilization surgeries, by a ratio of about 25-to-1.

To begin with, we guess from the tone of the questions that most users who ask or post about sterilization are not (yet) actively seeking or pursuing sterilization. They are simply in the early stages of considering it and ask for (very) basic information in accordance with that.

Even among those who originally intended to follow through, there is a natural dropoff. Some can't find a doctor after all. Others may have unanticipated insurance or job changes (or even changes in marital status) that shift them out of health insurance coverage. Most importantly, some people may find they aren't as certain as they thought and back out later in the process. In our experience, these outcomes are (collectively) far more common than successful sterilizations.

But we aren't doctors!

We aren't holding sterilization consultations with patients as medical professionals do; we're having online conversations, which are both free and much less time- and effort-intensive. Many users are only looking for information about sterilization and are not actively pursuing it, so they would talk to us online, but not visit a doctor for a sterilization consultation, so they can't follow through with a procedure.

TL;DR: Users who ask questions online about sterilization should not be interpreted as actively pursuing sterilization.

[porterdavis]

[processes]

Lab Rats Post-Rats Culture

[hennis]

Self-selection @tudelft

I have an cool seminar this month (18th) at my faculty, the topic is interesting enough to share with the world.

Title: Self-selection: What is it, why should we care, and what should we do about it?

Abstract: Wherever there is freedom of choice, self-selection is a potentially-relevant phenomenon. Self-selection occurs when people are not randomly-distributed with respect to conditions relevant to making a certain choice of interest, but instead they place themselves into conditions that are conducive to making their desired choice. Examples include self-selection into residential locations conducive to certain types of travel behavior, the decision whether or not to own an energy-efficient version of a device prior to the decision about using it, and similarly for the use of ICT. This seminar explains what self-selection is, how self-selection conceptually influences the impact of other independent variables on dependent variables, how the researcher can capture self-selection, and what the implications of self-selection for research findings and wider societal impacts are.

[jennaddenda]

"We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.

That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project."