Impact of body-focused social media on parenting confidence among postpartum moms as tested using an experimental design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose This study aimed to understand the impact of social media on postpartum mothers’ parenting confidence among participants in the Moms on Media Study, an experimental mixed methods study. Methods We used an embedded mixed methods approach among a sample of postpartum mothers of infants aged 0–6 months who were randomly assigned to view either body focused social media posts (experimental group, n = 65) or infant feeding tips (control group, n = 67) over a 5 day period. ANCOVA was used to examine differences between the experimental and control group on parenting confidence at post-intervention and 1 month follow-up. A subsample of mothers in the experimental group (n = 20) took part in semi-structured interviews post-intervention. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes and subthemes generated from the data. Results Counter to expectations, ANCOVA results show that at post-intervention mothers who viewed the body-focused posts scored significantly higher for total parenting confidence (mean difference = 1.36), parenting confidence (mean difference = 0.89), and support confidence (mean difference = 0.53). These differences in total parenting confidence (mean difference = 2.03), parenting confidence (mean difference = 1.40) and support confidence (mean difference = 0.50) were sustained at 1-month follow up. No significant differences were found for child development confidence between the experimental and control group at either post-intervention or 1-month follow-up. Qualitative analysis revealed that many mothers described feeling better about their parenting after viewing body-focused social media posts where they felt mothers were overly focused on their own image versus spending time with their child as a “good” mother “should.” Conclusions Body-focused social media posts may lead to downward social comparison among postpartum mothers. Findings may help inform interventions or clinical care focused on healthy social media exposure and use during the postpartum period.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".