MétaCan
Menu
← Back to cohort

The role of emotional labour in doula practice

2025· article· en· W4412044372 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Christina Young

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Science & Medicine · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEmployment and Welfare Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEmotional laborSociologyPsychologyLabour economicsMedicineNursingSocial psychologyEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Childbirth is an emotionally complex experience. Some women seek additional support during pregnancy and labour, beyond what is typically offered in a hospital setting. Birth doulas fill this role by providing continuous emotional and physical support during labour. Based on interviews with 26 doulas practicing in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how the work of providing emotional support to women during childbirth and avoiding conflict with hospital staff requires significant emotional labour - the purposeful management of emotion to incite certain feelings in clients or customers. Doulas perform emotional labour to accomplish two main tasks: managing their client's emotions during childbirth to help create positive birth experiences, and concealing emotions from hospital staff to avoid generating conflict. The inherently emotional context of childbirth also complicates demands for emotional labour, since doulas must balance their genuine emotional reactions to witnessing someone give birth with carefully managing their own affect to encourage particular feelings in their clients. Taken together, these findings indicate that doulas navigate a complex web of "feeling rules" that requires them to oscillate between manufactured emotion and authentic feeling - a demand that can be mentally exhausting. Overall, the emotional labour they perform seems to require a great deal of effort and skill - work that is often invisible and devalued. This study reinforces the importance of social support during the perinatal period by demonstrating that doulas attempt to "create" positive birth experiences, despite not playing a role in the medical management of the labour.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.043
Threshold uncertainty score0.085

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.013
Scholarly communication0.0040.001
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.468
Teacher spread0.436 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueSocial Science & Medicine→Same topicEmployment and Welfare Studies→French-language works237,207→