The proposed research is a 24-month longitudinal study designed to identify psychological antecedents and consequences of cesarean delivery both when the cesarean is planned and when it occurs unexpectedly. In conjunction with this aim, the role of parental personality characteristics, parents' expectations of their infant's characteristics, marital adjustment, and childbirth- related variables in parents' ratings of their infant's temperament will be examined to determine the amount of variance in temperament ratings that can be accounted for by these factors. Primiparous and multiparous parents, approximately 100 couples in each group, will begin their participation early in pregnancy. An attempt will be made to recruit multiparous parents so that there will be as many planning a cesarean as there are anticipating a vaginal delivery. Because it is usually not possible to know early in pregnancy whether a first-time parent will have a cesarean delivery, only an estimate (20%) can be made of the proportion of primiparous parents who will be in the cesarean group. In each of the six phases of the study (3 and 8 mos. of pregnancy, 3, 8, 13 and 18 mos. postpartum) parents will complete the Beck Depression Inventory, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the I, P, and C (locus of control) Scales, and the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire. Marital adjustment will be measured in the first and last phases with the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and a Transition to Parenthood measure will be completed in the second, third and fourth phases. The Bayley Scales will be administered to infants in each of the four postpartum phases. Additional variables, some less central to the specific aims of the project, will also be measured. Analyses of variance, the basic form being 2(delivery mode) x 2(parity) x 2(sex), but with covariates and repeated measures as appropriate, will be performed on all major variables. Correlational analyses will be used to examine both the relations between variables within phases and the stability over time of repeatedly measured variables. Regression analyses will also be conducted, with the prenatally measured and childbirth-related variables (e.g., delivery mode, medication level) as the predictors and selected variables from the postpartum phases as the criteria. Thus both group and individual differences will be examined. The data, finally, will be fit to a model of parental functioning which has as its major components marital relations, parental personality, childbirth experience, and child characteristics and development.
| Mebert, C J (1991) Dimensions of subjectivity in parents' ratings of infant temperament. Child Dev 62:352-61 |
