If you want a sense of what it’s like to work with him or have questions before applying, feel free to reach out!

If you want to hear from a nearly-finished phd student, who is cosupervised by Ruben, please reach out to me. I am happy to answer questions.

Almost 10 years ago I👵 started my first internship working with Ruben. He got me excited in personality science & methods. I have been working with him ever since and it is absolutely fantastic. He has been extremely supportive through all the ups & downs of my phd.

This is still a preprint, so if you have any feedback, we would be happy to consider it and potentially incorporate it in a revised version of the manuscript 😊

There is so much more cool stuff in this project (AMEs, robustness & sensitivity analyses) and I am super proud of Chiara Draxler, who has done an amazing job leading this project. This project would not have been possible without the work by @ruben.the100.ci and @larspenke.bsky.social 💪

Overall, women won’t stick with a hormonal contraceptive method, if they are unsatisfied with it – but we still do not know the particular reasons that lead to dissatisfaction and consequently discontinuation.

We could not confirm the idea of switches in contraceptive methods because of reduced sexual frequency or sexual satisfaction, providing evidence that causal effects based on cross-sectional studies are not likely to be distorted by hormonal side effects on sexuality.

For example, we argued that our positive effects of HC use on sexual frequency in this paper online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... might be explained by these “attrition effects”.

This is interesting, because there is the idea that women who experience negative effects (e.g., lower sexual frequency and satisfaction), might switch from HC to non-HC, covering negative & resulting in positive effects of HC on sexuality in correlational cross-sectional designs

Neither sexual satisfaction or sexual frequency significantly predicted the probability to switch, questioning the idea that women discontinue hormonal contraceptive use because of hormonal side effects on sexuality.

We found robust support for an effect of contraceptive satisfaction on the probability to switch – especially for women using hormonal contraceptive methods. HC users had an 8% [5%; 11%] smaller probability to switch when their contraceptive satisfaction increased by 1 point.

We used longitudinal data from the Continuity and Change in Contraceptive Use Study (www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/DSDR/stu...) with a sample of up to 1,993 women who participated in up to 4 waves with 6 weeks between each wave.