Measuring fluctuations in maternal well-being and mood across pregnancy

Abstract

Psychological health and well-being in pregnancy is not a stable construct but one that undergoes fluctuations across the different trimesters as pregnant women experience worries and anxieties pertinent to different stages of gestation. This paper aims to highlight the inefficiencies of measures commonly used to assess mood in non-pregnant populations when they are administered to pregnant samples, while also highlighting how modern advances in M-Health communication technologies enable immediate ecological momentary assessments, which minimise recall bias and maximise ecological validity and thus represent an opportunity to explore novel research paradigms to increase our understanding of the temporal nature of well-being during pregnancy.

Keywords:

• longitudinal
• pregnancy
• psychosocial factors
• quantitative methods
• perceptions