JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In recent years, the fertility issue in China has received more and more widespread attention.

Objective:

This study aims to detect attitudes toward giving birth to a baby among young users on Douban - a very popular Chinese social media platform.

Methods:

3,403 messages under the topic of “What does childbirth mean to a woman” on Douban were crawled for analysis. We employed both qualitative and quantitative descriptive analyses methods to understand user’s concept of childbirth.

Results:

Findings show that majority of the users expressed generally neutral (40.24%) or negative (39.90%) attitudes toward childbirth, only around one fifth of the users expressed positive (19.86%) attitudes. In the sampled messages, ‘pain’ (1520 times), ‘difficult’ (843 times), ‘suffering’ (832 times), ‘cry’ (648 times), ‘fear’ (595 times), and ‘tired’ (297 times) are the top six frequently used words to express negative experiences; while ‘joy’ (464 times), ‘happiness’ (359 times), ‘laugh’ (328 times), ‘cheerful’ (198 times), ‘cute’ (164times) and ‘thankful’ (157 times) are the six most frequently used words to express positive emotions. Messages with negative attitudes received more follows and likes, and the proportion of posts expressing negative attitudes increased with time in fluctuation. Childbirth cost is the most frequently mentioned health risk (12.87%), while subjective happiness or meet of mental needs are expressed as the major childbirth benefits. Only 10 comments (0.4%) talked about the traditional objective benefits of bringing up children for the purpose of being looked after in old age. Qualitative analysis suggested that discussions about fertility on social media may lead to exaggeration of women's perception of health risks, and many women lack knowledge about childbirth that to some extent due to traditional cultural bias that communications about these knowledges had long been neglected and avoided among individuals. In addition, people take for granted to consider that women should sacrifice themselves for childbirth and childcare because of the deification of female figure. Hence women may hesitate to have a baby due to the possibility of losing their subjectivity.

Conclusions:

The findings showed that modern Chinese women's concept of childbirth had changed with time because of their rising social status and the needs of self-realization. Strategies including public education of health risks of pregnancy and delivery, protecting women’s rights and providing a supportive environment for mothers may increase women’s childbirth willingness. Clinical Trial: The study’s ethics code is H15009, and it was approved by the IRB at the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.