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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Survey on Birth Choices

I’m passing this along for Holly Witteman, a PhD student at the University of Toronto. Please participate!

ETA: Holly just contacted me, and she has closed some of the surveys because they have received so many responses. Thanks to everyone for participating! She is still looking for American women who fit any of the following criteria:

- have chosen to give birth at a birth center
- have chosen to give birth attended by a family physician
- have chosen to give birth unassisted (unassisted will close soon -- that bin is almost full.)

She is also still looking for responses in all categories from women who live in Canada.

Subject: Research study about choice of birth place (home, hospital, birth center) and birth attendants (OB, FP, MW, UC)

A group of researchers at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada invite you to complete a survey about where and with whom you choose to give birth.

Are you or were you planning an "elective" c-section? A hospital VBAC? A midwife-attended homebirth? An unattended childbirth? We would like to hear about your choices and ask you some questions about yourself and how you made your decisions.

You may be eligible to participate in this survey if you are currently pregnant or have had a baby in the last 12 months.

The survey will be completed online and will take about 30 minutes. We are looking for 400 women total to complete the survey. We will randomly select four (4) out of the 400 women to receive an honorarium. Each of those four women will receive a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, or her country's Amazon.

If you are interested in taking the survey, please follow the link to learn more about the study and see if you are eligible to participate:
Holly Witteman
Ph.D. candidate
Interactive Media Lab
Human Factors
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Doctoral Fellow
Health Care, Technology and Place
University of Toronto
holly.witteman@utoronto.ca

7 comments:

  1. Why isn't homebirth with midwife one of the options? I live in the United States- does that exclude me from participating too?

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  3. [re-posted with grammar correction]

    It was an option, but as of June 3 around 11:50 p.m., we filled our quota of women who chose midwife-attended homebirths. (Actually, thanks to the participants so far, we exceeded our goal by quite a bit!)

    We want to represent a wide range of birth choices, so right now we are restricting responses to those that are statistically underrepresented in the results: birth center births, births attended by family physicians, and unassisted births. (UC is nearly at target and that option will close soon.)

    Responses from women in the US have been welcome and illustrative! Because we are Canadian researchers, we wish to make sure that women living in Canada are also well represented in the study. We have one place where the link to the study is supposed to go up soon from which we are expecting a number of Canadian responses, which is why the survey is still open to women living in Canada.

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  4. Just to expand, since I don't think it is entirely clear in my comment above: the survey is still open to women living in Canada regardless of birth choices.

    For women living in all other places, we are now only looking for responses from women who chose a birth center as their place of birth, a family physician as their birth attendant, or an unassisted birth.

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  5. awww, I would have loved to help out with the survey, but my baby girl is now 2 years old. boo. hoo. Good luck with everything though. :)

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  6. Ooooh! Can I steal this article?? I mean.. er.. use it?? :-P

    Michelle aka Primal

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