Psychosocial challenges and individual strategies for coping with mental stress among pregnant and postpartum adolescents in Nairobi informal settlements: a qualitative investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This study was part of a project funded under the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative to engage adolescent girls living in the main slums of Nairobi. This involved an innovative co-creation initiative through jointly designing and testing the feasibility of a toolkit of information, skill, and confidence-building, and coping mechanisms that can effectively shield them and their peers against the risks of mental stress during pregnancy and early motherhood. METHODS: Qualitative interviews and discussions from visual methodologies including Photovoice, digital storytelling, and public service announcements were conducted with 30 pregnant and adolescent mothers aged 14-19 years in four informal settlements either pregnant or having a child less than 2 years. The aims included; to generate an inventory of mental stressors during pregnancy and early motherhood; understand how mental stress affects the ability to seek care for themselves and their child, and understand individual coping strategies. RESULTS: The psychosocial challenges identified in order of importance included: chased from home by the parents; economic hardship; neglect and abandonment by the person responsible for the pregnancy; stigmatization by family, friends, and the community; feelings of shattered dreams; and daily stress related to living in poor and unhygienic conditions. During the pregnancy and early motherhood, the participants experienced feelings of embarrassment, shame, hopelessness, and to the extreme, suicidal thoughts clouded their minds. Main coping strategies included social isolation for some, socializing with other pregnant and adolescent mothers, and negative behaviors like the uptake of illicit drugs and alcohol and risky sexual relationships. CONCLUSION: The unpreparedness for early motherhood infused with inadequate psychosocial support led to increased mental stress and risk of depression. The interconnection between the triggers to mental stress showed the need to focus on a multifaceted approach to address the wellbeing of pregnant and adolescent mothers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".