Correction: Measuring social inequalities in self-reported miscarriage experiences in the United Kingdom
Correction
Heini Väisänen1* and Katherine Keenan2*
1Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED), Aubervilliers, France 2School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK *Corresponding author: Heini Väisänen, heini.vaisanen@ined.frThis is a correction to: Väisänen, H., & Keenan, K. (2025) Measuring social inequalities in self-reported miscarriage experiences in the United Kingdom. Journal of Critical Public Health, 2(3), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jcph.vi.79555
Context
As explained in our published paper (Väisänen & Keenan 2025, p.10), a routing mistake in the survey tool in the dataset that we used (the British Cohort Study 1970, sweep 7, collected at age 34) meant that the timing of pregnancies not ending in live births (including miscarriages, abortions and stillbirths) were not asked from most participants. In the paper we explain that we imputed these missing timings based on information about other pregnancies, because we know the order of previous pregnancies and the dates for live births; and participation in the previous wave, as pregnancy information was collected since previous wave for those who took part in wave 6, but since age 16 for those who did not.
Coding Mistake
When working on making the code publicly available on Github (https://github.com/socmisc), we noticed that there was a coding mistake in our Stata do-file. This affected 298 participants, who had taken part in sweep 6. For these participants, the possible imputed time range should have started in year 2000, which was the year of data collection for sweep 6, but instead it started in 1986 (age 16), although this value should have only been used for those who skipped wave 6.
Impact on the Results
We corrected the mistake and ran the analyses again. The corrected analyses did not change the main conclusions of the published paper, which stated that:
[...] socioeconomic differences in self-reported miscarriage risk are found when all women respondents are analysed. Women with higher education, income and/or occupational status were less likely to self-report a miscarriage at younger ages, but more likely to do so in their 30s and 40s. However, the effect is probably due to the likelihood of experiencing a pregnancy, as these differences disappeared, when only pregnant respondents were analysed. (Väisänen & Keenan 2025, p. 16)
However, the results are somewhat different for the 30-33 age group, which was the most affected by the coding mistake. Thus, below we show the corrected tables and figures. As shown below, the risk of miscarriage among this age group is somewhat higher than estimated in the original publication.
|
Age |
Pregnancy, N |
Miscarriage, N |
% miscarried* |
|
16-25 |
2,317 |
362 |
15.6 |
|
26-29 |
2,461 |
343 |
13.9 |
|
30-33 |
2,119 |
340 |
16.0 |
|
34-38 |
1,494 |
291 |
19.5 |
|
39-41 |
606 |
214 |
35.3 |
Table 1 (corrected): Number and percentage of respondents reporting at least one pregnancy or miscarriage by age.
Notes: * % miscarried calculated based on reporting at least one pregnancy/miscarriage within each age group rather than the ‘raw’ pregnancy/miscarriage numbers.
Figure 1 (corrected): Percentage of respondents reporting at least one miscarriage by age and socioeconomic position (occupational class, relative income and age left education). Notes: the x-axes vary
Figure 2 (corrected): Predicted probabilities of reporting at least one miscarriage by age and (a) occupational status, (b) relative income, (c) age left education; full sample. Notes: controlling for partnership and smoking.
Figure 4 (corrected): Predicted probabilities of reporting at least one miscarriage by age and (a) occupational status, (b) relative income, (c) age left education; pregnancy sample. Notes: controlling for partnership and smoking.
Funding
Heini Väisänen was funded by the European Union (ERC, SOC-MISC, grant number 101077594). Katherine Keenan was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Population Change Connecting Generations research programme, grant number ES/W002116/1. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency or the ESRC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority nor the ESRC can be held responsible for them.
ORCiD IDs
Heini Väisänen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5494-0415
Katherine Keenan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9670-1607
References
Väisänen, H., & Keenan, K. (2025) Measuring social inequalities in self-reported miscarriage experiences in the United Kingdom. Journal of Critical Public Health, 2(3), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jcph.vi.79555
Journal of Critical Public Health, Volume 3 (2026), Issue 3 CC-BY