| Chapter 1: | Maternal Expectations in 21st-Century U.S. Birth Culture |
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obstetric professionals to fully inform mothers of their available options, including those that might be outside their scope of practice.
Study Method
Because contemporary childbirth take place in a complex context but is at the same time highly personal and individual, a case study approach (Yin, 2008) was deemed best to address questions on the match between maternal expectations and later childbirth experiences. This allowed for identifying and tracking the unique trajectories that participants’ maternal expectations took from the time at which they first made them known to me in advanced pregnancy to the time of a postpartum follow-up interview.
I recruited women previously unknown to me to interview in late pregnancy and again approximately two months postpartum. Because case study research involves exploring participant views and experiences in depth, sample sizes are necessarily smaller than in traditional quantitative work (Holloway, 2008; Sandelowski, 1995). With my study focused not only on the maternal experience itself but also on the context within which it occurred, I intentionally sought women from diverse (as opposed to similar) demographic and geographic backgrounds, reflecting a criterion sampling strategy (Glaser, 1978). Balancing the interest in obtaining participant diversity with an equal interest in adequate in-depth analysis, I aimed for a sample of 75. The study received institutional ethics board approval.
From 2007 to 2009, I interviewed 82 pregnant women (expecting some attrition) in or near the third trimester of pregnancy recruited from electronic bulletin boards, regional medical clinics, and parent support organizations. Of the original 82 in the study, 75 (91.5%) completed the second interview. Mothers came from three locations: Most came from a midsize Pacific Northwestern metropolitan area and neighboring rural communities, and 20% came from either a large southern metropolitan area or a rural area in the Northeast of the United States. I interviewed about 30% of the mothers in person and the rest over the