Amanda Stevenson – “The Impact of Family Planning Budget Changes in Texas”

Dr. Amanda Stevenson, Department of Sociology, CU Boulder

Amanda Jean Stevenson is a sociologist trained in demographic and computer science methods. She studies the impacts of and responses to abortion and family planning policy. Beginning January 2017, she will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. In her current research, she uses demographic methods to study the impacts of reproductive health policies, and computational methods to study social responses to these policies.

Her analyses of the impact of reproductive health policies have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the journal Contraception. She translates her results into policy-relevant findings for non-academic audiences. For example, she regularly testifies on the demographic impacts of legislation, she developed an app to disseminate local impact estimates from her policy evaluation work, and her research has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, and in The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Austin-American Statesman, The Houston Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the Texas Tribune, and other outlets.

Another line of research examines the social responses to reproductive health policies. Currently, she is using Twitter responses to Texas' 2013 abortion restrictions to examine the microsociological processes that gave rise to and sustained a massive online conversation about abortion in Texas. She focuses on describing the conversation and its participants, investigating the role of emotions in supporting engagement, and assessing the role of emotions and relationships in transmitting intersectional analyses to movement elites.