Choice or Circumstance? An exploration of breastfeeding practice among Nova Scotian mothers classified as overweight or obese and income-related food insecure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Breastfeeding is a complex, relational practice spanning bio-physiological, social and structural considerations. Consistently, mothers across Nova Scotia report lower rates of breastfeeding initiation and duration of exclusive breastfeeding compared with mothers from other Canadian provinces. While breastfeeding is represented as a contributor to obesity prevention and supportive of food security (both timely public health issues for Nova Scotia), evidence suggests that excess maternal body weight and income-related food insecurity may negatively impact breastfeeding practice and outcomes. This qualitative study explored breastfeeding expectations and experiences among Nova Scotians also identifying as income-related food insecure and overweight or obese. Informed through feminist, post-structural methodology, this inquiry aimed to identify dominant discourses that shaped understandings of breastfeeding, excess body weight and food (in) security among participants who identified as living within these contexts, specifically how these discourses informed participants’ breastfeeding experiences and practices. Eight participants who were pregnant for the first-time with intention to breastfeed were invited to participate in three, separate, face-to-face, audiotaped interviews (prenatal, first month postpartum and 3 months postpartum) and six participants completed the study. Discourse analyses were conducted with prenatal (n=8) and postpartum (n=12) interviews. Findings suggest that the participants’ prenatal understandings of breastfeeding, obesity and food (in)security aligned with dominant discursive representations of these health issues, and informed through a socially constructed normative understanding of what it means to mother in a good and proper way. That is, participants identified that choosing to breastfeed, preventing obesity, and avoiding food insecurity are responsibilities of “good” mothering. These discourses were reinforced through exposures with institutions throughout the perinatal and postpartum period. Once participants became mothers, their experiences with breastfeeding during this time were largely shaped with a continued attendance to these dominant discourses. However, some participants resisted and reframed their conceptualization of good mothering to identify with maternal subjectivities that were both situation and context-specific. Ethical, supportive practice requires practitioners to critically reflect on how discourses shape normative maternal identities and their effects for health-related parenting practices that include breastfeeding.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".