Birth and motherhood survey

I recently received an email request from Samantha Reisz, a graduate student at Mills College in Oakland, CA, in Infant Mental Health. As part of her program, she is working on a research thesis project and is currently recruiting participants and collecting data. Her study explores the maternal psychological experience of birth and feelings about relationships and motherhood. It is an internet survey that takes 20-30 minutes to complete, and is anonymous (unless a participant chooses to give us identifying information, which is entirely voluntary and does not impact the results). They are recruiting mothers who have a baby under 12 months to whom they gave birth. The link is www.surveymonkey.com/s/birthandmotherhood.

Though birth is has become a more discussed issue in the past year or so, there is a serious dearth of methodologically sound research in the area of mothers' psychological experiences of childbirth, particularly in regard to how it may or may not be related to things such as personality, relationship with her partner, her feelings about being the mother of this child, feelings about motherhood in general, and maternal self-esteem, to name a few. With the ever increasing rates of cesarean deliveries,understanding the relationship between childbirth and later maternal functioning is very important--even if there is no relationship, which would be a relief and comfort to women who were not able to have the birthing experience that they wanted.