Listening and talking to women: informing the research agenda and the research process

Hearing from women in their own words about their experience of pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period is an important way of learning about their care from their point of view (Green, 2012; Rudman & Waldenström, 2007; Waldenström & Schytt, 2009). Sounds obvious? Actually, we spend a lot of time ignoring this vital perspective. In many instances, as psychologists and researchers from a wide range of other disciplines and professional groups undertaking studies, we are often preoccupied with our own preconceived ideas and hypotheses that we may miss the point about what is most important to women and their partners.

Also, engaging women and their families in our research may not always be a positive experience. It can be challenging to hear what may be discouraging feedback about our much nurtured and carefully developed research projects. Taking time to listen and also to talk with women about our perspective and what it means to them will produce both positive and negative comments. Undoubtedly it is best to hear this early in the process so we can conduct research that can lead to meaningful changes in practice and that have been identified as important by all parties. In most instances, research studies can be carried out better and feedback from the participants is an important source of information, often giving us insights that from our own experience as researchers we might not have gained. The role of parents as members of user groups in priority setting is currently an active one (http://www.lindalliance.org).

Engaging with individual women directly and user groups more broadly in planning the research we wish to undertake and for which we seek funding, patient and public involvement is not only valuable, but essential. This is reflected in the growth of patient and public engagement strategies throughout the health sector and initiatives such as healthtalk.org, which produces individual interviews online that reflect people’s experiences of health-related issues including pregnancy and childbirth. These initiatives are empowering for consumers of health care and provide a wealth of information for researchers when identifying research priorities (http://www.healthtalk.org).

Within the research process the benefits of pilot studies and cognitive interviews with women about the questions we are asking can be enormously informative as we have found in carrying out surveys of women who have recently given birth (Redshaw & Heikkila, 2010; Redshaw, Rowe, Hockley, & Brocklehurst, 2007). Also, regular survey work, such as the trust-based survey of the Care Quality Commission (2013) on maternity care in England, relies on women who have been interviewed or who have participated in focus groups participating and being prepared to describe their experience and feelings about their maternity care in designing and updating their survey questionnaires. The development of these well-informed survey tools has facilitated more population-based maternity surveys to inform local, national and international practice and policy. For example, women in Northern Ireland are currently participating in the largest population-based study of their experiences of maternity care ever conducted in Northern Ireland using a similar tool to that used in England and Queensland, Australia that will facilitate comparative international analysis (McKinnon, Prosser, & Miller, 2014; Miller, Thompson, Porter, & Prosser, 2011).

By engaging directly with women, we have a variety of studies using both qualitative and quantitative methods that continue to inform, illuminate and provide insights about many diverse aspects of care such as the psychosocial experiences of having fertility problems, worrying about giving birth, becoming a new parent or having another baby. In many areas their input leads to more sensitive and appropriate questions as was found with the Listening to Parents study in which we contacted parents after stillbirth or the death of their baby after birth (Redshaw, Rowe, & Henderson, 2014). For this study, Sands and parents involved with Sands contributed enormously to initiating the research and contributing to the research process. This engagement was also evident in previous studies reported in the journal addressing this and elsewhere (Lee, 2012; Mills et al., 2014).

The voices of women and their families in talking about the research agenda and their participation in qualitative studies expressing their views about their experiences provide a very rich and energising stimulus to all of those involved in this area as practitioners and researchers. Listening and talking to women throughout the research process is valuable whether the study aims to develop psychological measures, examine the effectiveness of an intervention or follow up families over time. A key area of development of our listening skills as researchers is more direct engagement with partners, as we often rely on the proxy of a woman reporting on her partner’s well-being and experience. Clear moves in this direction are evidenced by recent papers in the journal such as those by Marrs, Cossar and Wroblewska (2014) and Kowlessar, Fox and Wittkowski (2015).

We are fortunate that maternity care research has led the way within the field of health in relation to listening to the voices of women in relation to reproductive issues, pregnancy, childbirth and family research. However, many voices are still not strong enough in the research literature on reproductive health, for example, women or their partners who experience mental health problems, those living in low- and middle-income countries and those who have experienced infertility. As the papers published in this and other editions of the journal show, we are committed to carrying out research to providing a platform for the voices of all women and their families to be heard.

Maggie Redshaw and Fiona Alderdice