Social Information Research Articles

Common ownership and investor‐focused disclosure: Evidence from ESG financial materiality

AbstractIn this study, we investigate whether information demands made by common agents, specifically common institutional owners, drive firms to adopt a reporting framework that enhances the comparability and financial materiality of environmental, social, and governance information. Using a sample of 3659 unique US firms from 2015 to 2021, we collected data on the adoption of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board's reporting framework—identifying first movers, followers, and non‐adopting firms—and their levels of common institutional ownership. Our results are robust across changes in the levels of common institutional ownership, various combinations of fixed effects, and the application of an instrumental variable approach. Our findings support the idea that investors' demand drives comparability and financial materiality in sustainability reporting and that common ownership enhances such disclosure by alleviating the concern over the proprietary costs of revealing sensitive information. Our study offers new insights into patterns of intra‐industry disclosure behavior and a better understanding of how a group of increasingly significant market participants (i.e., common institutional owners) influences firms' commitment to investor‐focused disclosure.

Shaken to the core: trust trajectories in the aftermaths of adverse cyber events

PurposeAdverse cyber events, like death and taxes, have become inevitable. They are an increasingly common feature of organisational life. Their aftermaths are a critical and under-examined context and dynamic space within which to examine trust. In this paper, we address this deficit.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on pertinent theory and reports of empirical studies, we outline the basis of two alternative subsequent trajectories, drawing out the relationships between trust, vulnerability and emotion, both positive and negative, in the aftermath of an adverse cyber event.FindingsWe combine stage theory and social information processing theories to delineate the dynamics of trust processes and their multilevel trajectories during adverse cyber event aftermaths. We consider two response trajectories to chart the way vulnerability arises at different levels within these social systems to create self-reinforcing trust and distrust spirals. These ripple out to impact multiple levels of the organisation by either amplifying or relieving vulnerability.Research limitations/implicationsThe way adverse cyber events aftermaths are managed has immediate and long-term consequences for organisational stakeholders. Actions impact resilience and the ability to preserve the social fabric of the organisations. Subsequent trajectories can be “negative” or “positive”. The “negative” trajectory is characterised by efforts to identify and punish the employee whose actions facilitated the adverse events, i.e. the “who”. Public scapegoating might follow thereby amplifying perceived vulnerability and reducing trust across the board. By contrast, the “positive” trajectory relieves perceived vulnerability by focusing on, and correcting, situational causatives. Here, the focus is on the “what” and “why” of the event.Practical implicationsWe raise the importance of responding in a constructive way to adverse cyber events.Originality/valueThe aftermaths of cyber attacks in organisations are a critical, neglected context. We explore the interplay between trust and vulnerability and its implications for management “best practice”.

Jane Jacobs's urban vitality focusing on three-facet criteria and its confluence with urban physical complexity

Urban vitality is crucial for sustainability, contributing to social cohesion, information exchange, and overall quality of life. Understanding and quantifying urban vitality is essential for effective planning and policymaking, yet it remains a complex task. Previous studies have primarily focused on single-dimensional measures of urban vitality, overlooking the multifaceted nature emphasized by Jane Jacobs, including spatiotemporal dimensions. This study revisits Jacobs's urban vitality, focusing on three key indicators of intensity, diversity, and consistency of urban vitality. Additionally, we explore the relationships between urban complexity and urban vitality. We employ variety, uniformity, and connectivity metrics to assess urban complexity, which examines the physical structures of buildings, streets, and blocks. Linear regression and Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration statistics for non-linearity analysis are used to determine the associations between urban complexity and urban vitality. Our findings reveal nuanced details of the relationships. Notably, variety and connectivity variables have more significant influences on urban vitality than those related to uniformity. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the differential impacts of complexity variables on different types of vitality. These insights provide valuable guidance for planners and policymakers, facilitating the design of sustainable and vibrant cities by considering optimal complexity measures of built environment that enhance urban vitality.

Association of dietary patterns with serum uric acid and hyperuricemia in Chinese adults

Objective: To analyze the dietary patterns of Chinese adults and explore the relationship with serum uric acid (SUA) and hyperuricemia (HUA). Methods: A total of 9 358 adults were selected in the 2018 China Health and Nutrition Survey. Dietary intake data were collected by three consecutive 24-hour dietary recalls and weighing method. The social demographic information of the survey subjects was obtained through questionnaire surveys. The dietary patterns were extracted using factor analysis, and the relationship between dietary patterns and SUA was analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis. The correlation between HUA and dietary patterns was analyzed using logistic regression analysis models. Results: Four dietary patterns were identified: northern (high intakes of wheat, other cereals,and tubers); modern (high intakes of fruit, dairy, eggs, and nuts); southern (high intakes of rice and vegetables);animal food-wine (high intake of organ meats, seafood, and wine). The multiple linear regression analysis results showed that the northern pattern was negatively correlated with SUA (β=-0.438, 95%CI: -0.500--0.376); the modern pattern was negatively correlated with SUA (β=-0.134, 95%CI: -0.219--0.049); the southern model was significantly correlated with higher SUA (β=0.146, 95%CI: 0.079-0.214); the animal food-wine pattern was positively correlated with SUA (β=0.188, 95%CI: 0.123-0.252). Logistic regression analysis showed that compared with the northern model score Q1 group, the risk of developing HUA was reduced in Q3 and Q4 groups, with ORs values of 0.777 (95%CI: 0.650-0.929) and 0.509 (95%CI: 0.423-0.613), respectively; and compared with the modern model score Q1 group, the higher the scores in Q3 and Q4 groups, the HUA was lower, with ORs of 0.793 (95%CI: 0.660-0.953) and 0.768 (95%CI: 0.631-0.934), respectively. Compared with the animal food-wine pattern score Q1 group, the risk of developing HUA was increased in both Q3 and Q4 groups (Q3 group: OR=1.224, 95%CI: 1.012-1.480; Q4 group: OR=1.312, 95%CI: 1.086-1.584). Conclusions: Dietary patterns are associated with HUA. The northern and modern patterns are related to lower SUA levels and reduced risk of HUA, while the animal food-wine pattern increases the risk of HUA.

The relationship between self-serving leadership and employees’ expediency: a moderated mediation model

PurposeDrawing upon social information processing theory, this study investigates the correlation between self-serving leadership and employee expediency. It also explores the mediating effect of self-interest motivation and the moderating effect of trait mindfulness.Design/methodology/approachA total of 147 part-time MBA students were enlisted to participate in a scenario experiment (Study 1), and 291 valid employee questionnaires were collected through a multiple-time point survey (Study 2). SPSS 23.0, MPLUS 8.0 and PROCESS programs were used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses.FindingsStudy 1 illustrated a positive correlation between self-serving leadership and employee expediency. It also identified self-interest motivation as a mediating factor in the correlation between self-serving leadership and expediency. Study 2 replicated the results obtained in Study 1 and expanded upon them by demonstrating that trait mindfulness moderates the association between self-serving leadership and self-interest motivation. Additionally, trait mindfulness moderates the indirect effect of self-serving leadership on expediency.Practical implicationsThis research argues that organizations should take steps to prevent self-serving leadership in order to reduce employee expediency. Furthermore, it is advisable to provide ethics training to employees who exhibit high trait mindfulness, as they show increased sensitivity to self-serving leadership and are more likely to engage in unethical behavior.Originality/valueThis study expands the existing research on the ethical outcomes of self-serving leadership and contributes to a deeper understanding of the negative aspects of trait mindfulness.

Information quality and students’ academic performance: the mediating roles of perceived usefulness, entertainment and social media usage

PurposeThis study evaluates the mediating roles of entertainment, perceived usefulness, and social media use on social information (content) and students’ academic performance.MethodologyPrimary data was collected from 445 students at King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia using the snowball sampling strategy was employed. For data analysis, structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used.FindingsEntertainment partly mediates the link between social information quality “content” (IQ) and social media use (SMU) and SMU mediates the link between IQ and student’s academic performance (SAP). Perceived usefulness mediates the link between IQ and SAP. Suggesting that entertainment and perceived usefulness are crucially necessary for inspiring social media content to obtain optimum performance among graduate students. The study was limited to a single academic institution. Therefore, the results of the investigation cannot be generalized as a whole, and cannot track respondents’ social media activity over time. Thus, longitudinal data may be used in future investigations. Practical implicationsThe results of this study indicate that faculties can adapt and adjust their teaching methods and activities to incorporate social media, perceived usefulness, and entertaining content since it affects student performance. Social media (SM) has a significant influence on students’ social and academic performance. Thus, educational stakeholders, such as university authorities, the government, and parents and guardians, should recognize social media as a tool for achieving educational objectives.Originality/valueThe study enhances the application of UTAUT2 by examining how factors that influence the adoption of technology are connected to the subsequent influence of that adoption on students’ learning and conduct.

How unemployment benefit duration shapes startup motivation and growth

AbstractBusiness creation is economically important, and unemployment precedes the creation of a substantial share of new firms. Yet, most research has focused on analyzing the effects of unemployment insurance policies on re-employment outcomes, ignoring self-employment. In this paper, we analyze how the potential duration of unemployment benefits, a fundamental design choice of unemployment insurance systems, affects whether new firms are founded out of opportunity or necessity and their growth potential. To this end, we construct a comprehensive dataset on German firm founders that links administrative social insurance information with business survey data. Exploiting reform and age-related exogenous variation in the potential duration of unemployment benefits, we find that longer potential benefit duration implies longer actual unemployment and, as a consequence, more necessity entrepreneurship and worse startup outcomes in terms of sales and employment growth. We explain this overall effect of potential benefit duration through a mix of compositional and individual-level duration effects. Our findings underline that new firms started out of unemployment are a highly heterogeneous group and suggest that the (optimal) design of unemployment insurance systems has important externalities on whether innovation- and growth-oriented firms are started out of unemployment.

Inefficient and unique processing of social-emotional interference in school-aged children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder.

Interest is growing in investigating the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to process social information under conflicting and complex environments. However, few studies have employed objective behavioral measures to directly explore the underlying profile of social-emotional interference control. In the current study, 53 children with ASD and 53 typically developing (TD) control, aged 6-12 years, completed a set of modified flanker tasks involving arrows, schematic faces, same real faces (with facial interference by the same person), and different real faces (with facial interference by different people), respectively. Response time in incongruent (RTInc) and congruent conditions (RTCon), percentage of errors in incongruent (%ErrorInc) and congruent conditions (%ErrorCon), and flanker effect calculated by ΔRT = (RTInc - RTCon)/RTCon and Δ%Error = %ErrorInc - %ErrorCon were used as outcome metrics. We obtained three major results: (1) the ASD group had longer RTInc and RTCon compared to the TD group in the arrow, schematic-face, and same real-face tasks; (2) compared with the performance in the arrow flanker task, both groups exhibited longer RTs and reduced ΔRTs in the same real-face task; however, in the schematic-face task, longer RT and reduced ΔRT were exhibited in the TD group, but not in the ASD group; and (3) in the different real-face task, ASD group had higher %Error than the TD group, and %Error was negatively correlated with RT only in the ASD group. The current study delineates the inefficient processing of social-emotional interference in school-aged children with ASD and further suggests that these children might adopt a relatively optimized strategy like symbolization when dealing with emotional conflict. However, such compensatory cognitive strategies may be exhausted along with the increase in information load. These findings provide new perspectives of considering the difference more than difficulty in the cognitive profile of ASD, which will benefit the development of targeted behavioral interventions.

Environmental and Social Disclosure of Brazilian Banking Financial Institutions from the Perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate the determining factors that influence the disclosure of environmental and social information by the Brazilian banking sector from the perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the aim of identifying which organizational characteristics impact the level of socio-environmental disclosure. Theoretical Framework: In this topic, the main concepts and theories that underpin the research are presented. The study is based on the Theory of Legitimacy, which provides theoretical elements for socio-environmental disclosure. This theory explains management’s motivation to disclose environmental information, recognizing that organizational survival depends not only on financial success but also on the ability to maintain a social contract with society. Method: The methodology adopted for this research comprises a quantitative approach based on content analysis of sustainability reports from Brazilian banks. Data collection was carried out through the analysis of corporate disclosure reports published between 2016 and 2020. The regression model with panel data was used to analyze the influence of organizational characteristics on the dissemination of socio-environmental information from the perspective of the SDGs. Results and Discussion: The results obtained revealed that the size of the company and public control are factors that influence the disclosure of socio-environmental information regarding the SDGs. Whether or not the company owns shares on the Stock Exchange and its profitability have little impact on the amount of information disclosed about the SDGs. In the discussion section, these results are contextualized based on the theoretical framework, highlighting the implications and relationships identified. Possible discrepancies and limitations of the study are also considered in this section. Research Implications: The practical and theoretical implications of this research are discussed, providing insights into how the results can be applied or influence practices in the field of socio-environmental disclosure. These implications could encompass the banking sector, regulatory bodies, and policymakers. Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature by deepening the knowledge about environmental disclosure in the banking sector, a topic still little explored in academic studies. The relevance and value of this research are evidenced by its potential to inform better practices and policies for socio-environmental disclosure in the banking industry.

A qualitative exploration of the assessment process to cochlear implantation for children with hearing loss

Objective To explore the process of paediatric cochlear implant assessment, from referral to implantation, from the perspective of parents, cochlear implant professionals, and through observations of clinics. Design Qualitative approach, using grounded theory methodology. Study sample Twelve families with children under 5 years with permanent hearing loss referred for a cochlear implant or received an implant in the past year, and six professionals who refer or assess children for cochlear implants. Data collection involved interviews and ethnographic observations of assessment clinics. Results The core theme derived from interview and observation data related to the work of the cochlear implant assessment for families. The relationship between the work generated by the assessment process and capacity of parents to do the work provides a model to examine access to early implantation, consistent with the Burden of Treatment theory. We identified variation in terms of workload, relating to factors such as a child’s additional needs or number of appointments required, and in terms of capacity, relating to factors such as social circumstances or health literacy. Social, peer and professional support and information helped families manage the workload. Conclusions Findings have implications for delivery of paediatric cochlear implant services.

Infodemic Management in Senegal: Processes, Results and Community Contribution

This article examines Senegal's response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, with a particular focus on the management of infodemic, or the proliferation of rumours and misinformation. The advent of social media has precipitated a surge in the proliferation of rumours, rendering it a significant challenge for effective management. In response, the Risk Communication and Community Engagement Commission (RCCE) devised a comprehensive rumour management guide and conducted training for key informants from the community. The primary outcomes demonstrate an enhancement in rumour management and the accessibility of the rumour register. These outcomes were attained through robust community involvement in all processes and elevated mobile connectivity. Integrating the infodemic management mechanism into the national health and social information system remains a significant challenge, as does mobilizing resources for nationwide implementation. The principal insight gained is that effective infodemic management necessitates community involvement and coordinated multi-sectoral efforts.. (Abstract)

The effect and mediating mechanism of environmental, social, and governance information disclosure on sustainable growth rate: evidence from China

The effect and mediating mechanism of environmental, social, and governance information disclosure on sustainable growth rate: evidence from China

From Health Risks to Environmental Actions: Research on the Pathway of Guiding Citizens to Participate in Pocket-Park Governance

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the demand for urban pocket parks near residential areas, posing new challenges for environmental governance. However, there is a lack of research on how to engage citizens in pocket-park governance to address both potential and unforeseen risks. This study combines social information processing theory with a norm activation model to develop a framework that identifies the shaping stages and influencing factors of citizens’ intentions to participate in pocket-park governance. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling, this research analyzed the relationships among external factors, attitudes, moral norms, and intentions to participate based on 719 responses from an online survey targeting Chinese citizens in November and December 2023. Results indicate that health risks and pocket-park environmental quality positively affect perceived usefulness. Attitudes and moral norms are indeed important factors mediating the positive effect of the external environment on the intention to participate. The pathway of guiding citizens to participate in pocket-park governance is clarified, which helps bolster the resilience of urban green spaces and improve the quality of life of residents after public crises.

Fostering adaptation to climate change among farmers in Pakistan: the influential role of farmers’ climate change knowledge and adaptive capacity

IntroductionAdaptation to climate change (ACC) is imperative to avoid deleterious consequences of climate change in agriculture. However, the uptake of adaptation measures has been slow among farmers because of low adaptive capacity (AC) in developing countries, particularly in Pakistan. Farmers and their supporting institutions have been successful in introducing technological innovations to respond and adapt to environmental challenges. The present study intended to determine the impact of farming technologies, along with human, financial, social, physical, natural, and climate information resources that support AC and hence ACC.MethodsThe study collected data from 360 farmers in Punjab through a multi-stage random sampling technique. A binary logit model and odds ratio were used to identify the factors affecting ACC. The study also utilized correlation tests to show the correlation between each pair of variables included in the analysis.ResultsThe results indicated that physical capital such as ownership of tube wells, transportation, and sowing and harvesting tools by the farmers builds farmers’ AC and consequently determines the ACC such as change crop variety (CCV), change crop type (CCT), change planting date (CPD), soil conservation (SC), water conservation (WC), and diversification strategies (DSs). The findings also revealed that human capital (age, education, family size, and labor), financial capital (off-farm employment, access to the marketing of produce, and agricultural credit), social capital (farmers-to-farmers extensions, access to extension services, and the farm association membership), and natural capital (land ownership, tenancy status, and the location of the farm) were importantly related to farm households’ ACC strategies. The odds (likelihood) of adaptation were higher for the users of farm technology as compared to non-users.DiscussionThe analysis conducted in this study showed that climate information resources amplify the adaptation to climate change: technology allows farming to be much more efficient, while climate change knowledge (CCK) self-motivates farmers to adopt more ACC measures. Our findings provide evidence that suggests the need to provide credits and financial support for farming technologies that speed up the ACC in the long run, while in the short run, climate information should be spread among farming communities.

The role of loss aversion in social conformity: psychological and neural representations.

The impact of others' choices on decision-making is influenced by individual preferences. However, the specific roles of individual preferences in social decision-making remain unclear. In this study, we examine the contributions of risk and loss preferences as well as social influence in decision-making under uncertainty using a gambling task. Our findings indicate that while both individual preferences and social influence affect decision-making in social contexts, loss aversion plays a dominant role, especially in individuals with high loss aversion. This phenomenon is accompanied by increased functional connectivity between the anterior insular cortex and the temporoparietal junction. These results highlight the critical involvement of loss aversion and the anterior insular cortex-temporoparietal junction neural pathway in social decision-making under uncertainty. Our findings provide a computational account of how individual preferences and social information collectively shape our social decision-making behaviors.

Analysis of the status quo and clinical influencing factors of the social cognitive impairment in deficit schizophrenia.

Due to the high heterogeneity of schizophrenia, the factors influencing social cognitive impairment are controversial. The purpose of this study was to investigate the social cognitive dysfunction of deficit schizophrenia (DS), and to explore its clinical impact on the clinical characteristics and neurocognitive function assessment results. This study involved 100 DS patients, 100 non-deficit schizophrenia (NDS) patients, and 100 healthy controls (HC). Social cognitive functions were assessed using the Eye Complex Emotion Discrimination Task (ECEDT), Game of Dice Task (GDT), and Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), while neurocognitive functions were examined using the Clock Drawing Task (CDT), the Verbal Fluency Task (VFT), Digit Span Test (DST), Stroop Color-word Test (SCWT), and Trail Making Test (TMT). We analyzed the differences in cognitive function among the three groups of patients and the correlation between cognitive function assessment results and Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) scores. Comparison of neurocognitive functions among the three groups through CDT, VFT, DST, SCWT, and TMT revealed that in the values of these tests in the DS group differed significantly from those of the NDS and HC groups. However, the DSB of the NDS group was lower and the TMT results were significantly higher than those of the HC group. In the DS group, ECEDT emotion recognition was positively correlated with stroop colors and stroop interference; the score of gender recognition was positively correlated with VFT, DSF, and SCWT, and TMT-B; the total time spent was positively correlated with TMT; The GDT risky option was negatively correlated with VFT, DST, stroop word, and stroop interference; the negative feedback utilization was negatively correlated with PANSS-Negative; TMT was positively correlated with VFT; IGT was positively correlated with CDT, VFT, DST, and SCWT, but it was negatively correlated with PANSS-Negative and TMT, with statistically significant. There are significant social cognitive impairments in the perception of social information, judgment and resolution of social problems in deficit schizophrenia, which are closely related to negative symptoms and multidimensional neurocognitive dysfunction such as attention, learning, memory, brain information processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and functional executive power.

Top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries in narratives with overlapping event scripts

Understanding and remembering the complex experiences of everyday life relies critically on prior schematic knowledge about how events in our world unfold over time. How does the brain construct event representations from a library of schematic scripts, and how does activating a specific script impact the way that events are segmented in time? We developed a novel set of 16 audio narratives, each of which combines one of four location-relevant event scripts (restaurant, airport, grocery store, and lecture hall) with one of four socially relevant event scripts (breakup, proposal, business deal, and meet cute), and presented them to participants in an fMRI study and a separate online study. Responses in the angular gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were driven by scripts related to both location and social information, showing that these regions can track schematic sequences from multiple domains. For some stories, participants were primed to attend to one of the two scripts by training them to listen for and remember specific script-relevant episodic details. Activating a location-related event script shifted the timing of subjective event boundaries to align with script-relevant changes in the narratives, and this behavioral shift was mirrored in the timing of neural responses, with mPFC event boundaries (identified using a hidden Markov model) aligning to location-relevant rather than socially relevant boundaries when participants were location primed. Our findings demonstrate that neural event dynamics are actively modulated by top-down goals and provide new insight into how narrative event representations are constructed through the activation of temporally structured prior knowledge.

Examining the Impact of Brenda Dervin's Sense‐Making Methodology across Different Fields

ABSTRACTBrenda Dervin's Sense‐Making Methodology has had a significant impact on communication, information science, and other fields, with over 18,800 citations on Google Scholar. Researchers over the years, including a recent ARIST review, have studied Dervin's work. However, prior research has not analyzed a single article to see how it has been cited over the years across different fields. In this study, we examine 50 of the 1,766 articles published after the year 2000 that cited her 1983 paper. The research question investigated is, “What is the impact of Dervin's Sense Making Methodology in the twenty‐first century in fields outside of information science?” We found that sense‐making has been applied to social media, academia, and health information seeking, among other related fields. The findings should be useful to scholars interested in information science and methodology. The study also shows that information science is not a siloed field and impacts other fields.

Social presence and collaborative creativity in leaner media

As people increasingly rely on virtual spaces for both personal and professional exchanges, the dynamics of how we connect, share ideas, and work together have evolved. Online interactions often engage in modality switching where communication starts in one modality, such as talking, then switches to another, such as texting. We examined how modality switching affected creativity and social presence when collaborating using computer mediated communication. Participants first met via an audio or text modality, then switched to the other modality. They then engaged in a collaborative story creation task. Using the Social Information Processing Theory for our theoretical framework, we found that switching from text to audio benefitted creativity. We found no differences between texted and audio communication in social presence, desire for future interaction, or creativity. Replicating others’ results, we did find differences in conversational balance: Texted conversations were more balanced than audio conversations. We newly discovered that modality switching affected balance. Audio conversations were more balanced when they followed text interactions rather than preceded them. Ultimately, more balanced conversations – regardless of modality – led to greater creativity in dyads.

Changes in sexual activity in young women during pregnancy

Objective: To conduct changes in sexual activity during pregnancy and its related factors in pregnant women. Methods: The present descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017 on pregnant women who referred to the women's clinic of Afzalipour Hospital in the southeast of Iran. Participants were included in the study through convenient sampling. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of two parts of personal social information of the couple and questions to measure the level of sexual activity and the attitude of the subjects during pregnancy compared to before pregnancy. Results: 201 Pregnant women were included. The average age of pregnant women was (27.3±6.1) years and their average gestational age was (24.7±11.8) years. More than 62% of women had decreased sexual activity. There was a significant relationship between the amount of changes in sexual activity and delivery time (P=0.013), abortion history (P=0.001) and premature birth history (P=0.002). Most pregnant women believed that sex during pregnancy caused damage to the fetus (67.7%). A decrease in the intensity of sexual desire was reported in 63% of pregnant women. More than 60% of the subjects did not consult with doctors and midwives with regards to sexual issues (63.5%). The most common reason for not consulting was not feeling the need (32%). Most women experienced back pain during (42.8%) and after (39.8%) intercourse. Conclusions: Changes in sex life during pregnancy are often caused by the lack of sexual knowledge and the increase in misconceptions among couples, which can affect the quality of relationships. The role of education is essential. Therefore, it is suggested that by including sexual counseling along with pregnancy care, wrong beliefs and information among women will be corrected.