Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Acknowledgement
- Note on Numbers
- Introduction to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Origins
- 2 ‘A Friend a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’: Social Support and Health
- 3 Sickness in Salonica and Other Stories
- 4 Eve in the Garden of Health Research
- 5 A Bite of the Apple
- 6 Who’s Afraid of the Randomized Controlled Trial?
- 7 ‘One of Mummy’s Ladies’
- 8 Four Women
- 9 ‘Real’ Results
- 10 Women at Risk
- 11 The Poverty of Research
- 12 Models of Knowing and Understanding
- Appendix I Study Guidelines
- Appendix II Publications from the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome Study
- Notes
- References
- Index
5 - A Bite of the Apple
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Acknowledgement
- Note on Numbers
- Introduction to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Origins
- 2 ‘A Friend a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’: Social Support and Health
- 3 Sickness in Salonica and Other Stories
- 4 Eve in the Garden of Health Research
- 5 A Bite of the Apple
- 6 Who’s Afraid of the Randomized Controlled Trial?
- 7 ‘One of Mummy’s Ladies’
- 8 Four Women
- 9 ‘Real’ Results
- 10 Women at Risk
- 11 The Poverty of Research
- 12 Models of Knowing and Understanding
- Appendix I Study Guidelines
- Appendix II Publications from the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome Study
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
We recommend that the Department of Health co-ordinate a programme of systematic social and medical research aimed at establishing the reasons for, and reducing the incidence of, low birthweight. (Social Services Committee 1988-9: ix)
For some issues open-ended interview techniques are essential. We have to listen to what people say and allow them to define the problem in their own terms. (Richards 1983: 165)
When she entered the pilot study for the Social Support and Pregnancy Outcome project, Tracey Arkwright was a 20-year-old unemployed telex operator living with her 19-year-old husband in a council flat on a treeless, graffiti-strewn East London estate. Steve Arkwright had worked as a labourer, but was currently without a job. The previous year their first child, a boy, had been born early, weighing 992 g, and had died after two days. Tracey described what happened:
Six and a half months I was, and I’d been doing some things up here [in the flat ready to move in]. I think that's why I had him, and then I went home and had some pains, then about 2 o’clock in the morning they got stronger and I had the baby at 6 the next morning ..
That night, about 4 in the morning, my husband phoned the hospital up, because the baby’d lost some oxygen in his brain, you know what I mean, and he was just getting worse, and then on the Friday they were telling me what was wrong with him and on the Saturday he died .
It could have been anything, you know, maybe I done things, it could have been that … Painting, as I wanted the place decorated before he was born …
He said, like, the doctor who delivered him, said it's because you smoked that he come out early. I don't believe that really. I don't think it brings on the birth. It might make the baby small, but I don't think it brings it on. That's what he said, anyway …
I never liked him because when I was having the baby, and when I was in theatre, he said when you get the next feeling you want to push, tell me.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Support and Motherhood (Reissue)The Natural History of a Research Project, pp. 107 - 136Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018