Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding Maternity Care Decisions

Medical sociology research suggests that over the past century women's decisions about maternity care and birth have become highly constrained by medical technology and medical authority. Concurrently, various social movements, including the natural childbirth movement and health consumerism, have made alternative birthing options more visible and available to women. Taken together, the contemporary context of childbirth provides an opportunity to examine how, and in what ways, women navigate and assign value to competing types of knowledge when making health decisions. In this dissertation project, the researcher will conduct in-depth interviews with pregnant women who have never before given birth to understand the individual level influences that shape women's attitudes about birth, specifically how, and in what ways, social relationships, race, and social class influence women's attitudes about birth and their decisions about maternity care. This project engages several areas of sociology and advances knowledge in concrete ways. First, the research builds on medical sociology literature, particularly research on medicalization, by departing from the dominant "medical versus natural" framework for understanding why women make particular maternity health decisions. Whereas many studies examine only the larger context in which decisions about birth are made, this research will elucidate how individuals' attitudes about birth are shaped, and in what ways individual-level phenomenon intersect dominant discourse about birth. Second, this project will contribute to research on social relationships by exploring the role of individuals' interactions with others in shaping healthcare decisions. Many studies examining prenatal and postnatal experiences of women focus on the role of social support for shaping health outcomes, but this project will analyze the various dynamics of social relationships including the ways in which social influence occurs and how that may matter in the context of medicalization. Finally, examining women's health care behaviors will allow enable this research to speak to sociological research on gender and family by exploring ways in which notions of femininity and good mothering impact the highly gendered experience of pregnancy and childbirth.