IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0243898.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The relationship between digital media use during pregnancy, maternal psychological wellbeing, and maternal-fetal attachment

Author

Listed:
  • Melissa Smith
  • Annaleise S Mitchell
  • Michelle L Townsend
  • Jane S Herbert

Abstract

The widespread accessibility and use of the internet provides numerous opportunities for women to independently seek out pregnancy-related information and social and emotional support during the antenatal period. Given the heightened psychological vulnerability of the pregnancy period there is a critical need to examine digital media use within the context of the feelings that women have about themselves and towards their fetus. The current study examined the relationship between digital media use during pregnancy, psychological wellbeing and their maternal-fetal attachment using an online survey. Forty-eight pregnant women completed a self-report questionnaire on their reasons for using digital media, and standardised measures of self-criticism, negative affect, social quality of life (QOL), and maternal-fetal attachment. The mean age of participants was 29.4 years (SD = 5.26), with a mean of 24.3 weeks gestation (SD = 9.95). Information seeking, emotional support and social support were highly endorsed reasons for digital media use (85.42%, 66.67%, 62.5% respectively). However, digital media use was positively correlated with negative affect (p = .003) and self-criticism (p

Suggested Citation

  • Melissa Smith & Annaleise S Mitchell & Michelle L Townsend & Jane S Herbert, 2020. "The relationship between digital media use during pregnancy, maternal psychological wellbeing, and maternal-fetal attachment," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(12), pages 1-15, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0243898
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243898
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243898
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243898&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0243898?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0243898. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.