A STUDY OF MOTHERS OF PREMATURE INFANTS AND MOTHERS OF TERM INFANTS: THEIR PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR INFANTS AND THE QUALITY OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR HUSBANDS (PARENTING).
Contributors: New York University.
Published: 1986
Number of pages: 160
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Sociology, Individual and Family Studies.
Description: This descriptive, comparative study investigated perception of infant in 37 mothers of term infants and 28 mothers of premature infants at 2-4 days postpartum and at 6-8 weeks postpartum and sought an association between maternal perception of quality of relationship with husband and maternal perception of infant. The subjects were well-educated, Caucasian, married women who had a singleton infant in the well baby or special care nursery of the same suburban community hospital. A parent centered approach was used in these units.

Perception of infant was measured by the Neonatal Perception Inventories' (Broussard, 1976) comparison of own baby with average term baby scores for mothers of term infants and a comparison of own baby with average premature baby scores for mothers of premature infants. Mothers of preterm infants were more positive in their perceptions of their infants than were mothers of term infants at 2-4 days (t(63) = 1.69, p = .05) and at 6-8 weeks (t(63) = 2.16, p = .01) postpartum. Mothers of premature infants perceived their own infants to be better than average premature infants at 2-4 days (t(26) = -5.67, p = .00) and at 6-8 weeks (t(63) = -2.66, p = .013) postpartum when mean scores for the Your Baby scale were compared with mean scores of the Average Premature Baby scale. Associations between positive perception of relationship with husband, as measured by the Relationship with Husband scale of the Postpartum Self-Evaluation Questionnaire (Lederman, Weingarten, & Lederman, 1981) and perception of infant were not supported at 2-4 days or 6-8 weeks postpartum for either group of mothers, as tested by the Pearson product moment correlation.

Hypothesized results and actual findings were discussed. Several ancillary analyses of maternal perception of infant were performed. In addition, the seven scales of the Postpartum Self-Evaluation Questionnaire were evaluated for both groups of women at 2-4 days and 6-8 weeks postpartum. Conclusions and recommendations focused on contributions of the study for development of theory and future research in parenting the premature infant.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-04, Section: B, page: 1492.

Thesis (PH.D.)--NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, 1986.

School code: 0146.