Effect of birth type, gender on psychological resilience

Abstract

Introduction: Every human being has experienced different stressful situations or hardships sometime in their life. For babies born via C-section this hardship can start at the time of birth. Over the last 10 years there has been an increase in the Cesarean birth type from 8.5% in 2005-06 to 17.5% in 2015-16. Past research has shown the difference in physiological development, increased risk of obesity and asthma, behavioral difficulties in children and adults born via cesarean birth type. Method: The present study aims to study whether there are any birth types and gender differences in Psychological resilience among adults. Online and in-person survey method was used to collect the data of 220 participants through snowball sampling. Resilience Scale (RS) by Wagnild and Young (1993) was used to measure Psychological resilience. Results: 173 participants reported that they were born with Vaginal Birth (78.63%) and 47 with Caesarean Section Birth (21.36%). There were 75% female (N = 165) participants and 25% male (N = 55) participants in this study. The Skewness and Kurtosis were calculated through SPSS 23rd version, which revealed the data was normally distributed. Thus, hypotheses were tested though Univariate Analysis of Variance. The mean difference between Vaginal Delivery (139.01) and Cesarean Section (136.82) was 2.37. The mean difference between female (137.82) and male (140.64) scores in Resilience Scale is 2.82. The test results of One way ANOVA revealed that there no significant differences in Psychological resilience of the participants based on their birth type (F (1,218) = .65, ns) and gender (F (1, 218) = 1.28, ns). Conclusion: 1) There was no difference in Psychological resilience among Indian adults born with Vaginal Delivery and Cesarean Section delivery. 2) Male and female didn’t differ in their Psychological resilience.