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Pregnancy- and Childbirth-Related Media Use to Support Maternal Mental Health

Project description

On the crossroads of women’s health and media psychology

Pregnancy is not always a happy time. Expectant mothers often find themselves feeling stressed and anxious. Pregnancy-related anxiety, known as PRA, is a common problem during pregnancy, including labour and delivery. The EU-funded PACMUM project will explore the reasons pregnant women feel anxious despite being informed about their health and the health of their unborn child and about what to expect. PACMUM will use an interdisciplinary approach based on health psychology. It will explain how online media like YouTube can influence thinking and behaviours. Carrying out semi-structured interviews and a longitudinal panel study, PACMUM will shed light on the strategies that can support maternal mental health through online health media.

Objective

This interdisciplinary research project is situated on the crossroads of womens health and media psychology. The supervisor and the fellow, will combine their expertise to study how exposure to pregnancy- and childbirth-related content on the popular social media platform YouTube can affect pregnancy-related anxiety (PRA). We know from the womens health literature that pregnancy-related anxiety is a serious issue and many pregnant women seek health information online, and we know from the media psychology literature that seeking online health information can affect cognitions and behaviors, but these two fields of research remain disconnected. By bridging the two research fields, the scattered research will be systematized and extended. We set forth 2 objectives, each comprising three research questions: to improve our understanding of how pregnancy- and childbirth-related content on YouTube can fulfill different needs for women with PRA (objective 1), and to elucidate the underlying processes of the association between exposure to pregnancy- and childbirth-related content and PRA (objective 2). To reach our objectives, we will use a multimethodological approach, in which we combine semi-structured interviews (Work package 1, objective 1) and a longitudinal panel study following a cohort of women throughout their pregnancy (WP2, objective 2). The longitudinal panel study will be incorporated in the large scale mobile application-based Mom2B project currently running at the Uppsala University, which combines automatically collected digital phenotyping data, self-report questionnaires, and objective information from national health registers. This project will significantly improve our understanding of how social media can be strategically used by researchers and health workers to improve public health, but also of how peers and influencers on social media can informally and often unintentionally play a role in their followers health behaviors and experiences.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01

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Coordinator

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution
€ 222 727,68
Address
VON KRAEMERS ALLE 4
751 05 Uppsala
Sweden
Region
Östra Sverige Östra Mellansverige Uppsala län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data