www.mangold-international.com  -  Mittwoch, 7. Januar 2009
Druckversion der Seite "Werner Stadlmayr"  
(URL: http://www.mangold-international.com/365.html)

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As a clinically working obstetrician as well as a psycho analytically trained psychotherapist I am interested in all aspects concerning pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum time, attempting to develop an integrated view to biological and psychosocial dynamics in this field.

 

I came into research in the late 1990’s focusing on qualitative content analysis, first, to understand the explicit, and even more important, the implicit messages between the lines in written text, and then, in oral communications, like in videotaped semi-standardized interviews, evaluating a woman’s birth experience 48 – 96 hours postpartum.

 

Hypothesizing that the interaction between a new mother and her newborn infant might be affected by the birth experience and the way it is processed thereafter I became aware that no methods had been developed to time, assessing mother-infant interaction in the period before 6-8 weeks postpartum. Thus, in a cross-sectional project, we started to observe new mothers in a standardized breast- or bottle-feeding situation three weeks after childbirth.

 

At the same time I became familiar with the model of triadic family interaction, as developed by researchers from Lausanne, (Fivaz-Depeursinage E. and Corboz-Warnery A., et al.) and Basel (Bürgin D. and von Klitzing K, et al.), both Switzerland, providing additional information compared with the exclusive assessment of dyads, like in mother-infant or mother-father interaction. However, like in dyads, no methods on triadic interaction covering the period before 6 weeks postpartum were available, and our work group started to assess the parent-infant-triad using a standardized diaper-change-play (DCP) at week 3 postpartum.

 

Furthermore, given the prenatal roots of postnatal interaction behavior, our work group started to develop an assessment tool evaluating a couple’s prenatal triadic capacity when confronted with its unborn infant as represented by ultrasound pictures in week 20 of gestation (TC_sono20); this part of our research is done in collaboration with Dr. Ch. F. Boukydis, Chicago, USA, a specialist in prenatal mother-infant (dyadic) attachment research. In addition to the assessment of mother-infant interaction after term deliveries we are also working on the evaluation of mother-infant-interaction in the kangaroo-situation after premature birth.

 

Our approach to the methodological areas described comprises, first, qualitative content analysis of written text and oral communications, second, clinical macro-analytic evaluation of behavior, and third, the microanalysis of behavior, not easily accessible to observation without additional tools. Using INTERACT allows us the integrated analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication on a micro-level.

 

The above described methods and approaches have been integrated in the longitudinal long-term study ‘Triadic Family Functioning – an integrated approach to obstetrics and infant development’ within the NCCR ‘Swiss Etiological Study on Adjustment and Mental Health’ (www.sesamswiss.ch). In the framework of sesam we are integrated into a network of collaborating researchers.

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