Childbirth in a Technocratic Age: The Documentation of Women’s Ex ...

phone. Pregnancy interviews lasted 45–130 minutes, and the postpartum interviews lasted 20–90 minutes. I gave mothers a $15 retail gift card after each interview. The prenatal and postpartum interviews appear in the appendix.

My sample was not a statistical cross section of U.S. mothers, but it was diverse. Maternal education ranged from 8th grade to postgraduate, and annual family incomes ranged from no reliable income source to well above $75,000. About 30% were giving birth for the first time. Sixteen (21%) mothers were nonwhite, identifying themselves as Asian-American, African-American, Latina, or mixed race. Most mothers were married or had stable partners. Additional maternal demographic details appear in each of the individual birth-approach chapters (3–8).

I constructed a two-part, semistructured interview to elicit maternal accounts of childbirth expectations and subsequent experiences. Mothers completed the first interview during the last trimester of pregnancy and the second about two months postpartum, when childbirth-related emotions should technically have stabilized (O’Hara, 1987; Soliday, McCluskey-Fawcett, & O’Brien, 1999). Although I used the same basic set of questions with each participant, I often went “off script” to elicit more detail.

After transcribing audiotaped interviews verbatim, I applied well-established strategies for identifying themes, reducing and combining data, and validating thematic categories (Moustakas, 1994; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) in mothers’ original expectations that could be compared to their subsequent experiences. Then, to provide complete images of how well maternal expectations matched their individual childbirth ex-periences, I reviewed each case and identified instances in which themes were confirmed or violated. Each chapter contains a general accounting of expectancy confirmation and violation, followed by representative case descriptions.

The most salient thematic categories distinguishing subgroups of mothers were their expectations of discrete birth approaches, or pathways, and I describe the discrete pathways along with information relevant to