Effects of empowerment and continuous support on psychological factors, pain coping behaviors, and birth outcomes

Abstract

The purposes of this experimental design were 1) to compare self-efficacy, self-esteem, anxiety, labor pain, satisfaction level of child birth experience, pain coping behaviors, and birth outcomes between laboring women who had received the intervention of the "the empowerment and continuous support" and laboring women who had received routine care, 2) to compare self-efficacy, self-esteem, and anxiety between laboring women before and after receiving the empowerment and continuous support among laboring women in the experimental group. The subjects were 95 primiparas who had given birth in a regional hospital in the south of Thailand. Minimization techniques were used to assign the subjects into either the experimental group (49 cases) or the control group (46 cases). Data were collected through interviews and observations. Results showed that the laboring women in the experimental group had their mean scores for self-efficacy, anxiety, labor pain, pain coping behaviors, satisfaction level of child birth experience significantly different from those of laboring women in the control group. However, data for the laboring women in the experimental group revealed that those mean scores for self-esteem, length of labor, and Apgar scores were not significantly different from the mean scores for self-esteem, length of labor, and Apgar scores of the laboring women in the control group. After the "Empowerment and Continuous support" the laboring women reported higher mean scores for self-efficacy and significantly lower mean scores for anxiety. However, the mean scores for self-esteem after the intervention were not significantly different from the mean scores of self-esteem before the intervention. The results of this study would be beneficial for nurses to integrate the intervention "Empowerment and Continuous support" into their routine care of laboring women.

Keywords

• empowerment, continuous support, psychological factors, coping pain behavior, birth outcomes, labor pain