“Let me know when I’m needed”: Exploring the gendered nature of digital technology use for health information seeking during the transition to parenting (original) (raw)
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Investigation of Digital Technology Use in the Transition to Parenting: Qualitative Study
JMIR pediatrics and parenting, 2021
Background: The transition to parenting-that is, the journey from preconception through pregnancy and postpartum periods-is one of the most emotionally charged and information-intense times for individuals and families. While there is a developing body of literature on the use and impact of digital technology on the information behaviors of children, adolescents, and young adults, personal use of digital technology during the transition to parenting and in support of infants to 2 years of age is relatively understudied. Objective: The purpose of this study was to enhance our understanding of the ways digital technologies contribute to the experience of the transition to parenting, particularly the role these technologies play in organizing and structuring emerging pregnancy and early parenting practices. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted to understand new parents' experiences with and uses of digital technology during 4 stages-prenatal, pregnancy, labor, and postpartum-of their transition to becoming a new parent. A purposive sampling strategy was implemented using snowball sampling techniques to recruit participants who had become a parent within the previous 24 months. Focus groups and follow-up interviews were conducted using semistructured interview guides that inquired about parents' type and use of technologies for self and family health. Transcribed audio recordings were thematically analyzed. Results: A total of 10 focus groups and 3 individual interviews were completed with 26 participants. While recruitment efforts targeted parents of all genders and sexual orientations, all participants identified as heterosexual women. Participants reported prolific use of digital technologies to direct fertility (eg, ovulation timing), for information seeking regarding development of their fetus, to prepare for labor and delivery, and in searching for a sense of community during postpartum. Participants expressed their need for these technologies to assist them in the day-today demands of preparing for and undertaking parenting, yet expressed concerns about their personal patterns of use and the potential negative impacts of their use. The 3 themes generated from the data included: "Is this normal; is this happening to you?!", "Am I having a heart attack; what is this?", and "Anyone can put anything on Wikipedia": Managing the Negative Impacts of Digital Information. Conclusions: Digital technologies were used by mothers to track menstrual cycles during preconception; monitor, document, and announce a pregnancy during the prenatal stage; prepare for delivery during labor/birth stage; and to help babies sleep, document/announce their birth, and connect to parenting resources during the postpartum stage. Mothers used digital technologies to reassure themselves that their experiences were normal or to seek help when they were abnormal. Digital technologies provided
Investigation of Digital Technology Use in the Transition to Parenting (Preprint)
2020
Background: The transition to parenting-that is, the journey from preconception through pregnancy and postpartum periods-is one of the most emotionally charged and information-intense times for individuals and families. While there is a developing body of literature on the use and impact of digital technology on the information behaviors of children, adolescents, and young adults, personal use of digital technology during the transition to parenting and in support of infants to 2 years of age is relatively understudied. Objective: The purpose of this study was to enhance our understanding of the ways digital technologies contribute to the experience of the transition to parenting, particularly the role these technologies play in organizing and structuring emerging pregnancy and early parenting practices. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted to understand new parents' experiences with and uses of digital technology during 4 stages-prenatal, pregnancy, labor, and postpartum-of their transition to becoming a new parent. A purposive sampling strategy was implemented using snowball sampling techniques to recruit participants who had become a parent within the previous 24 months. Focus groups and follow-up interviews were conducted using semistructured interview guides that inquired about parents' type and use of technologies for self and family health. Transcribed audio recordings were thematically analyzed. Results: A total of 10 focus groups and 3 individual interviews were completed with 26 participants. While recruitment efforts targeted parents of all genders and sexual orientations, all participants identified as heterosexual women. Participants reported prolific use of digital technologies to direct fertility (eg, ovulation timing), for information seeking regarding development of their fetus, to prepare for labor and delivery, and in searching for a sense of community during postpartum. Participants expressed their need for these technologies to assist them in the day-today demands of preparing for and undertaking parenting, yet expressed concerns about their personal patterns of use and the potential negative impacts of their use. The 3 themes generated from the data included: "Is this normal; is this happening to you?!", "Am I having a heart attack; what is this?", and "Anyone can put anything on Wikipedia": Managing the Negative Impacts of Digital Information. Conclusions: Digital technologies were used by mothers to track menstrual cycles during preconception; monitor, document, and announce a pregnancy during the prenatal stage; prepare for delivery during labor/birth stage; and to help babies sleep, document/announce their birth, and connect to parenting resources during the postpartum stage. Mothers used digital technologies to reassure themselves that their experiences were normal or to seek help when they were abnormal. Digital technologies provided
How Women Use Digital Technologies for Health: Qualitative Interview and Focus Group Study
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Background: A range of digital technologies are available to lay people to find, share, and generate health-related information. Few studies have directed attention specifically to how women are using these technologies from the diverse array available to them. Even fewer have focused on Australian women's use of digital health. Objective: The Australian Women and Digital Health Project aimed to investigate which types of digital technologies women used regularly for health-related purposes and which they found most helpful and useful. Qualitative methods-semistructured interviews and focus groups-were employed to shed light on the situated complexities of the participants' enactments of digital health technologies. The project adopted a feminist new materialism theoretical perspective, focusing on the affordances, relational connections, and affective forces that came together to open up or close off the agential capacities generated with and through these enactments. Methods: The project comprised two separate studies including a total of 66 women. In study 1, 36 women living in the city of Canberra took part in face-to-face interviews and focus groups, while study 2 involved telephone interviews with 30 women from other areas of Australia. Results: The affordances of search engines to locate health information and websites and social media platforms for providing information and peer support were highly used and valued. Affective forces such as the desire for trust, motivation, empowerment, reassurance, control, care, and connection emerged in the participants' accounts. Agential capacities generated with and through digital health technologies included the capacity to seek and generate information and create a better sense of knowledge and expertise about bodies, illness, and health care, including the women's own bodies and health, that of their families and friends, and that of their often anonymous online social networks. The participants referred time and again to appreciating the feelings of agency and control that using digital health technologies afforded them. When the technologies failed to work as expected, these agential capacities were not realized. Women responded with feelings of frustration, disappointment, and annoyance, leading them to become disenchanted with the possibilities of the digital technologies they had tried. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the nuanced and complex ways in which the participants were engaging with and contributing to online sources of information and using these sources together with face-to-face encounters with doctors and other health care professionals and friends and family members. They highlight the lay forms of expertise that the women had developed in finding, assessing, and creating health knowledges. The study also emphasized the key role that many women play in providing advice and health care for family members not only as digitally engaged patients but also as digitally engaged carers.
Background: Many women in countries in the global North access digital media information sources during pregnancy and the early years of motherhood. These include websites, blogs, online discussion forums, apps and social media platforms. Little previous research has sought to investigate in detail how women use the diverse range of digital media now available to them and what types of information they value. A qualitative study using focus groups was conducted to address these issues. Methods: Four focus groups were held in Sydney, Australia, including a total of 36 women who were either pregnant or had given birth in the previous three years. The participants were asked to talk about the types of digital media they used for pregnancy and parenting purposes, why they used them and in what ways they found them useful or helpful (or not). Group discussions were transcribed and thematically analysed, identifying the dominant information characteristics identified by women as valuable and useful.
Parents' Perceptions About Future Digital Parental Support—A Phenomenographic Interview Study
Frontiers in Digital Health, 2021
Background: Parents use digital sources (such as the internet or online forums and applications) during pregnancy and after childbirth to receive informative support. Research shows that there is further need for innovation development in digital parental support despite informative support available in digital form.Purpose: To explore parents' perceptions of future digital parental support concerning pregnancy and the first 18 months of parenthood.Method: A phenomenographic interview study with an inductive approach including 15 semi-structured interviews was conducted.Results: The analysis process resulted in three descriptive categories: Opportunities for virtual and in-person meetings, Individualized digital parental support, and Professional knowledge and trustworthiness concerning future digital parental support.Conclusion: The results broaden the knowledge about how future digital parental support can be designed to facilitate the functional, interactive, and critical dig...
Societies
A diverse range of digital devices and software are available to women to seek and share information and personal experiences about pregnancy and parenting. This article reports findings from a focus group study involving Australian women who were pregnant or had very young children. The participants were asked to recount their experiences of using digital media for pregnancy and parenting and what media they would like to see developed that were not yet available. The findings revealed that digital media were very important to the participants. They were using mobile apps, social media, content-sharing platforms and online discussion forums to connect with each other and with family members, post images and other information about their pregnancy and children, track their pregnancy or their children's behaviours and development, and learn about pregnancy, infants and childcare. Despite their frequent use of and reliance on digital media, few participants had begun to consider the implications of sharing personal information about themselves or their children online or by using apps to record details. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the complexities of the intersections between information, emotional support, intimacy, personal data generation, sharing and privacy as they are conducted and experienced on the digital media used by women during these life stages.
JMIR Formative Research, 2020
Background During the turbulent postpartum period, there is an urgent need by parents for support and information regarding the care for their infant. In the Netherlands, professional support is provided during the first 8 days postpartum and for a maximum of 8 hours a day. This care is delivered by maternity care assistants (MCAs). Despite the availability of this extensive care, a majority of women prefer to make use of a lesser amount of postpartum care. After this period, access to care is less obvious. Where parents are automatically offered care in the first 8 days after birth, they must request care in the period thereafter. To compensate for a possible gap in information transfer, electronic health (eHealth) can be a valuable, easily accessible addition to regular care. Objective We explored the needs and preferred content by new parents and health care professionals of a web-based platform dedicated to the postpartum period and identified barriers and facilitators for using...
This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of the changing nature of support and information-seeking practices for women in the transition to first-time motherhood. In the context of increasing digitalisation, the significance of new virtual spaces for parenting is discussed. The paper demonstrates how women seek out alternative forms of expertise (specifically, non-medical expertise) and social support. The author argues for the importance of ‘intimate mothering publics’ through which women gather experiential information and practical support. These publics can act as a space for women to ‘test’ or legitimise their new identity as a mother. Intimate mothering publics are particularly useful for thinking about the meaning-making practices and learning experiences that occur during intimate online and face-to-face interactions. A variety of types of online support may be used during pregnancy. Surreptitious support in particular involves users invisibly receiving advice, information and reassurance that might otherwise be lacking. Access to intimate mothering publics is motivated by a number of factors, including feelings of community or acceptance, the desire to be a good mother or parent, emotional support and the need for practical and experiential advice.
Health Technology
Parent's use of apps to support their parenting is on the rise. The purpose of this narrative review of the literature is to explore the characteristics of research on parents' app use in the first year of parenthood, types of apps available to parents, and the factors that encourage or discourage parents' app use. A narrative review of the literature and thematic analysis of the full-text English language articles between January 2000 and December 2019 relating to parents' use of apps in the first year of parenthood was conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature using seven academic databases: CINAHL Plus with Full Text, MEDLINE, SocINDEX with Full Text, PsychINFO, Academic Search Complete, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Forty-one articles were included based on prespecified eligibility criteria. The majority (n=30) discussed a parenting app or mHealth intervention that included an app. Most studies (n=15) recruited women as participants and were conducted in Australia (n=10). Thematic analysis of the eligible articles (n=41) revealed four themes: (I) increased app use related to shifts in parenting trends; (II) types of apps available to parents; (III) apps to overcome the digital divide; and (IV) factors encouraging or discouraging app use. Although numerous literature reviews have been conducted to explore parents' use of online resources, none of the reviews specifically focus on mobile apps developed to support parents in the first year of parenthood. This research advocates that health professionals and researchers should find alternatives to standardized means of delivering and developing parenting social support to fulfill contemporary parents' needs.