Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

What information matters when pregnant youth and their health care providers are making health-related decisions? Canada dedicates substantial resources to information campaigns for pregnant women and health care providers (HCPs), with the aim of improving the health of pregnant women and newborns. Despite our investment in these "knowledge translation" campaigns, we know little about the role of such information in informing health decisions related to pregnancy and childbirth. Teenage pregnancy and childbearing is associated with a higher risk of many health problems to mother and baby, yet we know even less about the information behaviour of pregnant youth than we do about mothers in general. The perinatal period (that encompassing pregnancy and a short time after birth) is a time of much health decision-making. Many perinatal health questions, such as whether to prescribe or consume a given medication, require careful weighing of risks and benefits. By exploring the information experiences of young (13-19 years) pregnant women in BC and their perinatal HCPs, this project aims to describe what information they think about, seek, access, value and use in making health decisions. Data collected via focus groups and individual interviews with pregnant youth and perinatal HCPs in British Columbia will be qualitatively analyzed in order to improve our understanding of how these individuals and populations interact with health information. The goal of this project is to generate usable theory that can be applied to improve the way we communicate health information to young pregnant women and their HCPs, in order to improve the health of teenage mothers and their babies.