Preconception knowledge, beliefs and behaviours among people of reproductive age: A systematic review of qualitative studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The health of parents before pregnancy influences the short- and long-term health of their offspring. This systematic review explored the preconception knowledge, beliefs and behaviours held by women and men of childbearing age. METHODS: Databases were searched from 2009 to 2022 (MEDLINE, CINAHL Full-text, PsycINFO, EMBASE). Inclusion criteria specified qualitative research papers which recruited individuals of reproductive age (16-45 years) without existing chronic illnesses. Data were quality assessed and analysed using thematic synthesis. RESULTS: Twelve papers met inclusion criteria. Six themes were identified (cultural context, pregnancy planning, knowledge, gender roles and responsibility, information seeking, prior health behaviours) which relate to individual, social, psychological and cultural factors. Cultural context was related to all other themes. Pregnancy planners had greater motivation to optimise their health whereas those not actively planning were focused more on becoming financially stable. Women and men's knowledge of how and why to engage in health protective behaviours was limited, with health risks and behaviour change discussed in the context of pregnancy rather than preconception. Gender roles influenced individual responsibility for preparation for pregnancy, which in turn influenced information seeking behaviours and engagement in health behaviours. Online sources of support and information were seen as desirable, regardless of pregnancy planning stage. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that behaviour change interventions designed to support people to optimise health before conception should address cultural, individual, social and psychological factors to facilitate behaviour change. Development of online resources may help to increase accessibility for people across different cultural contexts and stages of pregnancy planning.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".