Fathers’ Experiences in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: A Search for Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This qualitative study aimed at understanding the experiences of fathers of very ill neonates in the NICU. METHODS: Sixteen fathers of very ill and/or very preterm infants who had been in the NICU for >30 days were interviewed by a male physician. Fathers were asked about their level of comfort with or concerns about staff communication regarding their infant, about accessing information, and about more general perceptions of their experience in the neonatal intensive care unit. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed for analysis. Coding used content analysis with construction of themes by 3 researchers. RESULTS: The overarching theme for fathers was a sense of lack of control. Their world view, as a "backdrop" theme, provided context for all of the themes. Four other interrelated subthemes were identified, including information; communication, particularly with the health care team; fathers' various roles; and external activities. Fathers reported that relationships with friends/family/health care team, receiving information consistently, and receiving short written materials on common conditions were ways of giving them support. The fathers said that speaking to a male physician was a positive and useful experience. CONCLUSIONS: Fathers experience a sense of lack of control when they have an extremely ill infant in the NICU. Specific activities help fathers regain a sense of control and help them fulfill their various roles of protectors, fathers, partners, and breadwinners. Understanding these experiences helps the health care team offer targeted supports for fathers in the NICU.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".