The Relationship between Pregnancy Stress and Anxiety in High-risk Pregnant Women: The Mediating Effect of a Sense of Mastery

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between pregnancy stress and anxiety in high-risk, pregnant Korean women and the mediating effect of the sense of mastery. The participants in this study were 118 high-risk pregnant women. They were diagnosed with high-risk pregnancy during the 20th–38th weeks of gestation at university hospitals between March 3rd, 2015, and March 30th, 2015, and they either visited obstetrics and gynecology outpatient clinics for prenatal examinations or entered delivery rooms. Collected data were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 22 program. Participants’ general and obstetric characteristics were analyzed using descriptive statistics, such as frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The relationship between the participants’ pregnancy stress, anxiety, and sense of mastery was investigated using the Pearson's correlation coefficient. In order to investigate the mediating effect of the sense of mastery on the relationship between the participants' pregnancy stress and anxiety, a multiple regression analysis was conducted. To investigate the significance of the mediating effect, the Sobel test was conducted. We confirmed that the sense of mastery exerted a significant partial mediating effect on the influence of the participants' pregnancy stress on anxiety. This study is significant since it empirically verified that the anxiety of high-risk pregnant women decreased as the pregnancy stress decreased and as the sense of mastery increased. Based on the findings of the present study, future studies should focus on developing prenatal intervention programs aimed at the prevention and management of high-risk pregnant women's anxiety and on investigating the effectiveness of such programs.