“There’s an Etiquette to Zoom That’s Not Really Present In-Person”: A Qualitative Study Showing How the Mute Button Shapes Virtual Postpartum Support for New Parents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virtual spaces that allow parents in the postpartum period to connect, support each other, and exchange information have been increasing in popularity. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents had to rely on virtual platforms as a primary means to connect with others and attend to their postpartum health. This study explored virtual postpartum support sessions through the web-based videoconferencing software, Zoom. Guided by feminist poststructuralism and sociomaterialism, we held seven virtual support sessions for parents caring for a baby 0-12 months in age, in Canada, and interviewed 19 participants about their experiences in the sessions. Our methodological approach allowed us to analyze discourses of (1) parenthood, (2) material realities of virtual environments, and (3) support and information on this virtual platform. The purpose of this research was to understand how technology influences postpartum support and learning through online videoconferencing for parents. Our findings document an overarching discourse of Zoom etiquette by which muting was a discursive practice that all participants used. The consistent use of the mute button while not talking structured conversation in virtual postpartum sessions and resulted in three themes: (1) minimizing disruptions; (2) taking turns; and (3) staying on task. The norm of using the mute button changed how parents received and gave support and information. Based on findings and broader literature, we discuss considerations for facilitation of virtual postpartum support sessions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".