Stress and Coping Strategies among Mothers with Preterm babies admitted in NICU- A Descriptive Correlational Study from South India
Abstract
Background: Mothers of newborns admitted to NICU have reported a loss of control over a vital life event. This stress may be aggravated by the child’s appearance, difficult medical technologies, use of medical equipment, and fear of newborn death. When the baby is born preterm with complications, parents undergo severe mental stress and experience heightened distress, including increased anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms, compared with parents of healthy infants when their child is admitted to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
Aim: To assess the stress and coping strategies among mothers of preterm babies admitted to the NICU.
Methods: A quantitative research approach with a non-experimental descriptive correlational design was adopted to study stress and coping strategies among mothers with preterm babies. Seventy mothers with preterm babies admitted to the NICU at a selected tertiary hospital, Karnataka were selected by convenience sampling technique. The standardised Parental Stress Scale (PSS), and Brief Cope Scale (BCS) were used for collecting the data regarding stress and coping strategies among mothers of preterm babies.
Results: The data were analysed with descriptive statistics for a description of sample characteristics and research variables and inferential statistics like Pearson correlation for correlation. Results revealed that the majority of the mothers (82.8%) had higher stress, and the most (51.4%) of them employed moderate coping strategies. Stress and coping strategies had shown a significantly high negative correlation to support the existence of an inverse relationship between them.
Conclusion: The study concluded that stress and coping strategies among mothers of preterm babies admitted to the NICU are measurable constructs, and both were found to be negatively correlated. Most of the mothers had higher levels of stress, and the majority of them were using moderate levels of coping strategies to overcome the stressful situations.
How to cite this article:
Dey A, Latha U S, Radha M S, Srinivasan P. Stress
and Coping strategies among Mothers with
Preterm babies admitted in NICU- A Descriptive
Correlational study from South India. Chettinad
Health City Med J. 2025;14(2):32-39.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24321/2278.2044.202521
References
World Health Organization. Preterm birth [Internet]. Geneva: World Health Organization; [cited 2024 Mar
. Available from: https://www.who.int/news-room/ fact-sheets/detail/preterm-birth
Ohuma EO, Moller AB, Bradley E, Chakwera S, Hussain Alkhateeb L, Lewin A, Okwaraji YB, Mahanani WR,
Johansson EW, Lavin T, Fernandez DE. National, regional, and global estimates of preterm birth in
, with trends from 2010: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2023 Oct 7;402(10409):1261-71. [Google
Scholar] [Pubmed]
Malliarou M, Karadonta A, Mitroulas S, Paralikas T, Kotrotsiou S, Athanasios N, Sarafis P. Preterm parents’
stress and coping strategies in a neonatal intensive care unit in a university hospital of central Greece. Materia Socio-Medica. 2021 Dec;33(4):244. [Google Scholar] [Pubmed]
