Self-esteem, stress, and depressive symptoms among Jordanian pregnant women: social support as a mediating factor

ABSTRACT

This study purposed to assess the mediating role of social support between stress, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem among Jordanian pregnant women. Across-sectional study recruited a total of 538 pregnant Jordanian women using a cluster stratified random sampling technique, during the period from September 2019 to February 2020. The study used the following measures: The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and Multidimensional Social Support Scale (MSPSS). Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to test the mediating effect of social support in terms of the association between depression and self-esteem. The results were considered significant if p ≤ .05. The findings showed that 75.6% of participants had moderate-to-high stress levels. High levels of stress, depressive symptoms, and low self-esteem were highly correlated with low social support (p < .05). Depressive symptoms predict the self-esteem (F_{(2, 537)} = 158.631 p < .05). Social support significantly mediates the relationship between the depressive symptoms and self-esteem with p = .01. Thus, during the antenatal care, administration of screening tools to identify pregnant women with low social support levels and at risk of developing psychological difficulties would allow primary healthcare to promote for positive health outcomes for the mothers and the babies.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• pregnant women
• self-esteem
• social support
• stress

Acknowledgement

The research team would like to thank all women who generously shared their time and their experience for the purpose of this study. Also, we thank all the workers at the health centers who facilitated the data collection procedure and the statisticians at the department of statistics who helped us in the sampling technique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the ethics committee at of the Jordanian Ministry of Health (JMOH).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.