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

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.