Selected aspects of perceiving and experiencing birth - study of men participating in hospital childbirth and men with an experience of home childbirth

Abstract

Participating in childbirth of his own child can be a plane for redefi ning man’s own identity and self-esteem. The study aimed to verify whether there is a relationship between the place of childbirth and selected aspects of man’s perceiving and experiencing participation in childbirth of his own child and to assess the relationship between man’s perception of childbirth as an essential life experience and an experience affecting selfesteem. The study included 147 men aged 18 to 57 years (M = 34,56; SD = 8,29) who had experience of participating in the delivery of their child. The conducted research was preliminary. The research was carried out using the diagnostics survey method and nonprobabilistic sampling. The data were collected anonymously via the survey questionnaire. The collected data was analyzed using descriptive statistics methods, with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Mann-Whitney U tests and the analysis of Spearman’s ρ rank correlation, with the IBM SPSS Statistics 23 package. The threshold of α = 0.05 was considered as the signifi cance level. Main results: (a) According to the respondents, man’s participation in birth of his own child is an important factor infl uencing self-esteem; (b) the stronger perception of childbirth as an important event in life, the more this  experience affects selfesteem according to the respondents. The research shows the importance of the father participation in the childbirth for the self-esteem level of the man. The preliminary study indicates also the need for in-depth  research on the participation of the father at childbirth and on the multifaceted importance of this presence.