Qualitative Study on Postnatal Depression
Abnormal Psychology
In our Abnormal Psychology module, I was tasked with carrying out a qualitative study on blogs posts about a specific mental illness. From this qualitative study I was asked to uncover the common themes that ran throughout multiple blog posts about a specific illness and discuss how this refers back to previous research on that topic.
The Research
This assignment was done in pairs and my partner and I chose to carry out our research on postnatal depression. We chose this topic as we felt it was a very much misunderstood mental illness and we wanted to learn more about the topic while getting the ability to read about real stories from women with the illness.
Initial Research
Our first task was to find open-source, public blog posts written by women who were suffering or who had suffered with postnatal depression and condense this into a script to analyse.
To complete our initial analysis, we placed our script into a word cloud generator to see if any words were recurring and to give us an idea of the frequency of certain terms.
Thematic Analysis
Following this initial word cloud, a thematic analysis was carried out and four major themes were identified: stigma, lived experience, medical assistance and shame. Sub-themes were then taken from these major themes. Inter-rater reliability was validated by having both researchers independently carry out a thematic analysis and code the data.
Reporting Findings
A final report was done to research previous information collected about the lived experience of postnatal depression and to compare our findings in our qualitative study to that of previous research. Following the report, we presented our findings to the class to inform them about postnatal depression and the direct impacts this has on the mother specifically.
Learnings
This assignment was my first experience with qualitative research and the task of coding and pulling themes from the script was a new skill I had to learn. As an empathetic person who has an interest in understanding more about the personal side of mental illnesses, this assignment was so interesting to me. I gained an insight the lived experience of those with postnatal depression while also doing my best to explain this lived experience through the themes and sub-themes to allow others to better understand this.
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​As this assignment was done in pairs, it also allowed me to use my teamwork and cooperation skills. Time management and organisation were an important part of this assignment as the process involved in a qualitative study is very methodical, taking time to carry out each step before you can move on to the next. I would like to potentially carry out further research using a qualitative approach as it allowed for a more content rich data collection which provided real-life perspectives on living with a mental health issue.