Abstract

• The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of social support intervention on mood and maternal confidence of premature's mothers. The social support intervention is known to induce improved mood state and provide information on caretaking so as to increase the maternal confidence in the mother of a premature. To systematically investigate its effect, this study employed a nonequivalent randomized post-repeated quasi-experimental design. The intervention was given individually to mothers of prematures five times spanning five weeks. The sample consisted of the 50 mothers (experimental 27, control 23) of a premature. The data were collected using the structured questionaires twice as post tests. Various instruments were used in this study. The POMS developed by Lee(1990) was used to measure the mothers' mood state, Mother and Baby Scales by Wolke et al (1987). The results are as follows: 1. For the hypothesis test to see the effect of the social support intervention, the mean of the experimental group and the control group was compared by means of t-test and the following results are obtained. Hypothesis I. "The mood state of mothers with social support intervention is more positive than that of the mothers without such intervention." was not statistically supported and thus discarded (t=.799, p=.429). However the mean scores were 49.68 and 51.38 for the experimantal and control group, respectively, indicating more positive mood for the experimental group. Hypothesis II. "The maternal confidence of mothers with social support intervention is higher than that of the mothers without the intervention." was statistically supported (t=3.667, p=.001). 2. The mean score of the mood state was highest before discharge (52.29), meaning most negative, declined to 49.68 shortly after the discharge, again increased a bit to 50.07 at four weeks after the discharge, and stabilized to 49.22 around six weeks after the discharge. On the other hand the mean score of the maternal confidence was continuously increased with time. In view of the above results, it is concluded that the social support intervention with a preprogrammed protocol has the definite positive effect on increasing the maternal confidence and positive effect on improving mother's mood state.
• Keywords: Premature; Social support; Mood; Maternal confidence

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