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Perceived social support on postpartum mental health: An instrumental variable analysis.

ABSTRACT: The postpartum period is a challenging transition period with almost one in ten mothers experiencing depression after childbirth. Perceived social support is associated with mental health. Yet empirical evidence regarding the causal effects of social support on postpartum mental health remains scarce. In this paper, we used a nationally representative panel data of women to examine causality between perceived social support and postpartum mental health. We used fixed-effect method and included dependent variable lags to account for past mental health condition before birth (i.e., the pre-pregnancy and prenatal periods). The study also used an instrumental variable approach to address endogeneity. We find a declining trend in postpartum mental health between 2002 to 2018. Our study also showed that past mental health (i.e., before childbirth) is positively correlated with postpartum mental health. A universal routine mental health screening for expectant and new mothers should remain a key priority to ensure mental wellbeing for the mothers and their infants.

SUBMITTER: Inekwe JN

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9070871 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Perceived social support on postpartum mental health: An instrumental variable analysis.

Inekwe John Nkwoma JN Lee Evelyn E

PloS one 20220505 5

The postpartum period is a challenging transition period with almost one in ten mothers experiencing depression after childbirth. Perceived social support is associated with mental health. Yet empirical evidence regarding the causal effects of social support on postpartum mental health remains scarce. In this paper, we used a nationally representative panel data of women to examine causality between perceived social support and postpartum mental health. We used fixed-effect method and included d ...[more]

PMID: 35511885

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Project description:Past research on the associations between area-level/contextual social capital and health has produced conflicting evidence. However, interpreting this rapidly growing literature is difficult because estimates using conventional regression are prone to major sources of bias including residual confounding and reverse causation. Instrumental variable (IV) analysis can reduce such bias. Using data on up to 167,344 adults in 64 nations in the European and World Values Surveys and applying IV and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, we estimated the contextual effects of country-level social trust on individual self-rated health. We further explored whether these associations varied by gender and individual levels of trust. Using OLS regression, we found higher average country-level trust to be associated with better self-rated health in both women and men. Instrumental variable analysis yielded qualitatively similar results, although the estimates were more than double in size in both sexes when country population density and corruption were used as instruments. The estimated health effects of raising the percentage of a country's population that trusts others by 10 percentage points were at least as large as the estimated health effects of an individual developing trust in others. These findings were robust to alternative model specifications and instruments. Conventional regression and to a lesser extent IV analysis suggested that these associations are more salient in women and in women reporting social trust. In a large cross-national study, our findings, including those using instrumental variables, support the presence of beneficial effects of higher country-level trust on self-rated health. Previous findings for contextual social capital using traditional regression may have underestimated the true associations. Given the close linkages between self-rated health and all-cause mortality, the public health gains from raising social capital within and across countries may be large.

Dataset Information

Perceived social support on postpartum mental health: An instrumental variable analysis.

Publications

Perceived social support on postpartum mental health: An instrumental variable analysis.

Similar Datasets

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