Pregnancy- and Childbirth-Related Media Use to Support Maternal Mental Health

This project is situated on the crossroads of women’s health and media psychology. I will combine my expertise as a media scholar with a focus on health communication with the expertise of my supervisor (a professor of midwifery) to study how exposure to pregnancy- and childbirth-related content on the popular social media platform YouTube can play a role in pregnancy-related anxiety (PRA). This project will build on the literature on health information seeking and entertainment-education to disentangle the association between watching pregnancy- and childbirth-related content on YouTube and PRA by focusing on three objectives: (1) Understand which pregnancy- and childbirth-related content women are exposed to, (2) Elucidate the underlying processes of the association between exposure to pregnancy- and childbirth-related content and PRA, and (3) Understand how pregnancy- and childbirth-related content on YouTube can fulfill different needs for women with PRA. To reach these objectives, I will use a multimethod approach to not only quantify effects, but also qualitatively understand how women with PRA give meaning to such content. This project will significantly improve our understanding of how social media can be strategically used to improve public health, but also of how content creators on social media can informally and often unintentionally play a role in their followers’ health behaviors and experiences.