Strong Joe, Moore Ann M, Coast Ernestina, Owolabi Onikepe, Fetters Tamara
Visiting Fellow, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Principal Research Scientist, Guttmacher Institute, New York, NY, USA.
Sex Reprod Health Matters. 2025 Dec;33(1):2531684. doi: 10.1080/26410397.2025.2531684. Epub 2025 Sep 1.
The experiences and timings of pregnancy recognition trajectories have significant impacts on pregnancy-related care. Understanding individuals' contextually informed trajectories is crucial to their reproductive rights and service delivery needs. While many studies take pregnancy recognition as a starting point, capturing the complexities and nuances of these trajectories has received much less attention. This paper critically reflects on new approaches to capturing pregnancy recognition trajectories in two studies conducted between 2018 and 19, one in Nigeria with women aged 18 and over ( = 394), and a three-country study with adolescents aged 10-19 in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zambia ( = 313). Pregnancy recognition trajectories were complex and involved multiple physical, material, and psychological recognition factors. Adolescents in the three-country study cited predominantly between two and four factors that led to their pregnancy recognition, with a range of one to seven factors. In the Nigerian study, 43.4% of respondents named two factors that led them to recognise they were pregnant, with a range of one to five factors. As pregnancy recognition is the starting point for many public health actions and interventions, it is imperative that future survey tools better capture this complex and poorly understood process. Our analyses suggest that questions should include response categories that capture physical, material, and psychological contributors to pregnancy recognition, including open-ended responses to capture heretofore unidentified aspects of this process. Questions on the duration of time between recognition factors would be beneficial, as well as an understanding of what factors were most important to an individual when recognising a pregnancy.
怀孕认知轨迹的经历和时机对与怀孕相关的护理有重大影响。了解个人在具体情境下的认知轨迹对于他们的生殖权利和服务提供需求至关重要。虽然许多研究将怀孕认知作为起点，但捕捉这些轨迹的复杂性和细微差别却很少受到关注。本文批判性地反思了在2018年至2019年期间进行的两项研究中捕捉怀孕认知轨迹的新方法，一项在尼日利亚针对18岁及以上女性（n = 394），另一项是在埃塞俄比亚、马拉维和赞比亚针对10 - 19岁青少年的三国研究（n = 313）。怀孕认知轨迹很复杂，涉及多种身体、物质和心理认知因素。三国研究中的青少年主要提到两到四个导致他们认知怀孕的因素，范围是一到七个因素。在尼日利亚的研究中，43.4%的受访者提到两个导致他们意识到自己怀孕的因素，范围是一到五个因素。由于怀孕认知是许多公共卫生行动和干预的起点，未来的调查工具必须更好地捕捉这个复杂且了解不足的过程。我们的分析表明，问题应包括能够捕捉导致怀孕认知的身体、物质和心理因素的回答类别，包括开放式回答以捕捉该过程中迄今未被识别的方面。关于认知因素之间时间间隔的问题会很有帮助，以及了解在认知怀孕时哪些因素对个人最重要。
