Socioeconomic status and stress rate during pregnancy in Iran

BACKGROUND: Stress during pregnancy can have serious adverse outcomes on the mother, the fetus, newborn, children and even adolescents. Socioeconomic status has been recognized as a predictor of stress amongst pregnant women.

OBJECTIVES: The first aim of this study was to investigate the role of socioeconomic status in pregnancy stress rates. The second aim was to examine the most important items of socioeconomic status including monthly family income, husband occupational status as well as mother's educational level and their influence on the rate of maternal stress.

METHODS: This study was cross-sectional research and was conducted on 210 pregnant women in three trimesters of pregnancy who attended Shahryar hospital for prenatal care between August-October 2012. They completed two questionnaires of Socioeconomic Status and Specific Pregnancy Stress. Collected data were analyzed by SPSS version 19 including T-test, one-way ANOVA and Spearman correlation.

RESULTS: In this study, we considered family income, education and husbands' occupations as the most important variables which may influence perceived stress during pregnancy. The mean age of women was 27±4.8 years. The final result showed that there is no significant relationship between SES and pregnancy stress level (P > 0.05), while we found a significant relationship, as well as indirect correlation between husbands' occupational status and pregnancy stress (P < 0.05, r= -0.364).

CONCLUSION: Further investigations may be considered for extending the results to all pregnant women. Thus, health officials and universities should finance other studies to investigate this fact and whether other dimensions of SES influence pregnancy stress levels or not.