Search results

The impact of birth beliefs on pregnancy and delivery are universally recognized, but the factors that affect birth beliefs vary across regions depending on individual and cultural characteristics. This study aimed to determine women's birth beliefs and examine their associated factors.

This cross-sectional study was conducted with 548 primiparas in the obstetrics clinic of a university hospital located in the Southeastern Anatolian Region of Turkey from February to June 2019. Descriptive characteristics, form and the Birth Beliefs Scale were used in data collection. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, T-tests and ANOVA analyses were used.

It was determined that factors such as age group, income level, any problems during pregnancy and preferred delivery mode statistically affected women's birth beliefs.

Based on the findings from this study, healthcare personnel should provide training and consultation services to pregnant women starting from the prenatal period to help ensure a positive labor experience.

This paper aims to understand the maternal health vulnerabilities of migrant women in slums and explore their challenges during and after childbirth.

The study used a qualitative approach, including in-depth interviews through purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Thematic analysis was used for analysing data. The consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative studies (COREQ)-32 items were followed for reporting this study.

The study found that migrant women were highly susceptible to adverse birthing outcomes due to risks involved in birthing, lack of care and hygiene, lack of skilled care in dealing with complicated pregnancies and exposure to domestic and obstetric violence.

The study intends to highlight the narratives of female migrants’ birthing and maternal health challenges. The entire process of childbirth in slums with consequences can result in maternal and infant morbidities and mortalities.

Servicescape is well recognized by marketing scholars as a key influence in transformative service outcomes. However, the concept of enabling transformative health outcomes through physical servicescape design is often overlooked. The purpose of this study is to integrate marketing's servicescape research with birth territory theory and the enabling places framework, conceptualizing a Co-Curated Transformative Place (CCTP) framework.

This cross-disciplinary conceptual paper uses three places of birth (POB) servicescapes for low-risk birthing women to ground the CCTP framework.

Positioned within transformative service research, this study shows how POB servicescapes are CCTPs. The organizing framework of CCTP comprises four key steps founded on agile and adaptive co-curation of physical place resources.

This study extends the servicescape conceptualization to incorporate the continuum of terrain, introducing adaptive and agile co-curation of places.

The materiality of place and physical resources in CCTP are usefully understood in terms of co-curated substantive staging according to service actor needs. The CCTP servicescape maximizes desired value outcomes and quality experience by adaptive response to service demands and service actors’ needs.

Theoretical discourse of health servicescapes is expanded to focus on the material components of place and their foundational role in generating resources and capabilities that facilitate the realization of service value. In the CCTP, service actors flexibly select, present and adapt physical artifacts and material resources of the service terrain according to dynamic actor needs and service responsibilities, enabling transformative outcomes. Co-curation facilitates reciprocal synergy between other dimensions of place and servicescape.

This paper analyses how firm births and deaths are influenced by previous firm births and deaths in related and unrelated sectors. Competition and multiplier effects are used as the theoretical lens for this analysis.

This paper uses 2008–2016 Irish business demography data pertaining to 568 NACE 4-digit sectors within 20 NACE 1-digit industries across 34 Irish county and sub-county regions within 8 NUTS3 regions. A three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation is used to analyse the impact of past firm deaths (births) on future firm births (deaths). The effect of relatedness on firm interrelationships is explicitly modelled and captured.

Findings indicate that the multiplier effect operates mostly through related sectors, while the competition effect operates mostly through unrelated sectors.

This paper's findings show that firm interrelationships are significantly influenced by the degree of relatedness between firms. The raw data used to calculate firm birth and death rates in this analysis are count data. Each new firm is measured the same as another regardless of differing features like size. Some research has shown that smaller firms have a greater propensity to create entrepreneurs (Parker, 2009). Thus, it is possible that the death of differently sized firms may contribute differently to multiplier effects where births induce further births. Future research could seek to examine this.

These findings have implications for policy initiatives concerned with increasing entrepreneurship. Some express concerns that public investment into entrepreneurship can lead to “crowding out” effects (Cumming and Johan, 2019), meaning that public investment into entrepreneurship could displace or reduce private investment into entrepreneurship (Audretsch and Fiedler, 2023; Zikou et al., 2017). This study’s findings indicate that using public investment to increase firm births could increase future firm births in related and unrelated sectors. However, more negative “crowding out” effects may also occur in unrelated sectors, meaning that public investment which stimulates firm births in a certain sector could induce firm deaths and crowd out entrepreneurship in unrelated sectors.

This paper is the first in the literature to explicitly account for the role of relatedness in firm interrelationships.

Each ethnic group has its own peculiar cultural practices that may widen inequalities in child health and survival among ethnic groups. This study estimated ethnic disparities in mortality of under‐five‐year‐olds, controlling for individual and community level characteristics. Using multilevel multivariable regression analysis on a nationally representative sample drawn from 7,864 households in the 2003 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, we estimated the risks of deaths under‐five‐year‐olds for 6,029 children nested within 2,735 mothers aged 15‐49 years old, who were in turn nested within 365 communities. Results were expressed as odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals. The observed risk of under‐five death was highest among children of Hausa/Fulani/Kanuri mothers and lowest among children of Yoruba mothers. The mother's affiliation to the Yoruba ethnic group, compared to Hausa/Fulani/Kanuri, was still significantly associated with decreased under‐five mortality (OR = 0.66, 95% CI = 0.45 ‐ 0.96) after adjustment for individual and community level factors. Under‐five mortality was significantly related to socio‐economic and demographic factors (birth order/birth interval, mother's age, and mother's education), which explained much but not all of the ethnic disparities. Findings underscore the need for measures aimed at improving female education and the socio‐economic standard of women, changing short birth spacing norms and reducing inequitable distribution of maternal and child health services.

This study aims to examine the effect of maternal food intake before and during pregnancy on birth weight.

As a prospective cohort study, a total of 585 pregnant women of first trimester, visiting Tehran Metropolitan Area public health centers and private sectors (clinics and hospitals), were interviewed at first phase, and pregestational dietary intake was obtained by a 168-item semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. At the third trimester, dietary recalls were collected via interview. Finally, birth weight information was extracted from health records. Univariate and multivariate analysis was used to explore the effect of maternal and nutritional factors on birth weight.

The results of the analysis show that direct measures of nutrition, measured as food group consumption at first and third trimester of pregnancy, had no significant effect on birth weight once the confounding factors were controlled (p > 0.05). Of control variables included in the analysis, twin pregnancy outcome (p = 0.000), pregnancy number (p = 0.04), prepregnancy weight (p = 0.004) (marginally significant) and gestational age (p = 0.000) (marginally significant) were associated with birth weight.

The results of this study show no significant role of mother’s nutrition during pregnancy on birth weight, while long-term nutrition outcomes such as prepregnancy weight had significant role. It seems the main reasons behind less important role of pregnancy nutrition on birth weight in this study include the following: food intake deficiency is not a major problem for participants, and cross-sectional data on food intake are less important on outcome of pregnancy weight than long-term nutritional status outcome variables such as mother’s weight and height. This finding should be addressed in public health planning for women at childbearing age.

The purpose of this paper is to take a forecasting approach to examine the relationship between the US birth rate, marriage rate, and economic conditions (measured by both realized unemployment and expected unemployment). The expectation data come from the Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

Utilizing monthly data, the authors first specify a univariate and three augmented autoregressive integrated moving average forecasting models for 1975-2001. Second, the authors use recursive estimation to generate multi-period forecasts of the birth rate for 2002-2008. Third, the authors employ standard evaluation methods to compare the predictive information content of the forecasts.

First, the birth rate is pro-cyclical. Second, the marriage rate contains useful predictive information for the birth rate. Third, controlling for past information in the birth and marriage rates, both realized and expected unemployment embody useful information for predicting the birth rate. Fourth, expected unemployment is a more informative indicator than realized unemployment.

The finding that the birth rate is pro-cyclical emphasizes the importance of economic stability in promoting childbearing, and the authors suggest counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy to shield families from major shocks. A stable economy, and especially one where families are optimistic about the future, promotes childbearing. The results also empower policymakers to analyze systematically the impact of changes to the structure of marriage on childbearing.

This appears to be the first study that utilizes a forecasting approach to better understand the complex relationships between childbearing, marriage, and macroeconomic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a psychometric scale – the birth satisfaction scale (BSS) – for assessing women's birth perceptions.

Literature review and transcribed research‐based perceived birth satisfaction and dissatisfaction expression statements were converted into a scored questionnaire.

Three overarching themes were identified: service provision (home assessment, birth environment, support, relationships with health care professionals); personal attributes (ability to cope during labour, feeling in control, childbirth preparation, relationship with baby); and stress experienced during labour (distress, obstetric injuries, receiving sufficient medical care, obstetric intervention, pain, long labour and baby's health).

Women construct their birth experience differently. Views are directed by personal beliefs, reactions, emotions and reflections, which alter in relation to mood, humour, disposition, frame of mind and company kept. Nevertheless, healthcare professionals can use BSS to assess women's birth satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Scores measure their service quality experiences.

Scores provide a global measure of care that women perceived they received during labour.

Finding out more about what causes birth satisfaction and dissatisfaction helps maternity care professionals improve intra‐natal care standards and allocate resources effectively. An attempt has been made to capture birth satisfaction's generalised meaning and incorporate it into an evidence‐based measuring tool.

The aim of this study is to describe how Swedish women, planned for vaginal birth, perceive the quality of intrapartal care that they receive and the subjective importance they ascribe to their care.

The study was nested within a Swedish national survey of intrapartal care. The women whose care was investigated were invited to participate in the current study by the midwife who attended the birth. A total of 1,173 women agreed to answer a questionnaire about “quality of general care” and “quality of specific intrapartal care” at two months postpartum. The questions were posed in two ways, the perceived reality (PR) of care given and the subjective importance (SI) the women ascribed to this care.

A total of 739 women (63 percent) returned their questionnaires. Scores for PR and SI for “quality of general care“ were in the main high (PR range 2.98‐3.81; SI range 2.85‐3.85, out of a possible 4) and also for “quality of specific intrapartal care” (PR range 3.15‐3.86; SI range 3.23‐3.86, out of a possible 4). A total of 12 items showed statistically significantly higher scores for SI than for PR. Of the women, 81 percent agreed fully or mostly that the birth of their child was a positive experience.

The way in which women answer questions about intrapartal care reflects the way in which the questions are posed. This study therefore has asked not only how care was perceived but also what importance individual women ascribed to different areas of their care. The questionnaire used in this study allows identification of areas where “what is, could be better”.

The purpose of this paper is to describe what it is like to be a midwife in the professionally isolated and marginalised arena of home birth in Ireland and to explore whether the organisation of home birth services and professional discourse might be undermining the autonomy of home birth midwives.

This paper is drawn from auto-ethnographic field work, with 18 of the 21 self-employed community midwives (SECMs) offering home birth support to women in Ireland from 2006 to 2009. The data presented are derived from field notes of participant observations and from interviews digitally recorded in the field.

Home birth midwives must navigate isolated professional practice and negotiate when and how to interface with mainstream hospital services. The midwives talk of the dilemma of competing discourses about birth. Decisions to transfer to hospital in labour is fraught with concerns about the woman's and the midwife's autonomy. Hospital transfers crystallise midwives’ sense of professional vulnerability.

Maternity services organisation in Ireland commits virtually no resources to community midwifery. Home birth is almost entirely dependent upon a small number of SECMs. Although there is a “national home birth service”, it is not universally and equitably available, even to those deemed eligible. Furthermore, restrictions to the professional indemnification of home birth midwives, effectively criminalises midwives who would attend certain women. Home birth, already a marginal practice, is at real risk of becoming regulated out of existence.

This paper brings new insight into the experiences of midwives practicing at the contested boundaries of contemporary maternity services. It reveals the inappropriateness of a narrowly professional paradigm for midwifery. Disciplinary control of individuals by professions may countermand claimed “service” ideologies.