Pregnant women's feelings relating to childbirth

Each year, approximately 115,000 children are born in Sweden, and about one in five pregnant women experience childbirth-related worry or fear. In this project, we validate a questionnaire assessing fear of childbirth and investigate factors associated with this fear during pregnancy.

In Sweden, maternal care services have a long tradition of providing support to pregnant women experiencing fear of childbirth. There is, however, a lack of good instruments to identify, assess and understand this fear.

In this project, we have translated The Fear of Childbirth Questionnaire (FCQ) to Swedish, and aim to evaluate if this scale could be useful in a Swedish context. This scale has been developed by a team of researchers in collabortaion with pregnant women in the UK. We compare the FCQ with other instruments used to measure fear of childbirth in clinical practice and research. In addition, we examine risk and vulnerability factors, as well as psychological mechanisms associated with fear of childbirth.

This is a crossectional questionnaire study conducted online. Pregnant women aged 18 or above can participate. The survey is in Swedish and takes about 20 minutes to complete. We do not collect any information with the purpose of identifying our participants (i.e. no name, social security number, contact details, IP address or the like).

Researchers with a background in psychology, midwifery and obstretrics from four Swedish universities collaborate in the project.