Spirituality, Anxiety and Antenatal Outcomes

Abstract

The present study aims to examine the relationship between spirituality and anxiety during 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy, the relationship between spirituality and antenatal outcomes viz., gestational age, infant weight and apgar score of 1 and 5 minutes and the relationship between anxiety during 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy and antenatal outcomes. The study was conducted on a sample of 100 pregnant women of age range between 20-35 years during 2nd and 3rd trimester of their pregnancy who were recruited in Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Institute of Medical Sciences Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. The study follows a correlational design. Spirituality and anxiety have been treated as independent variables, and antenatal outcomes have been treated as dependent variables. Spirituality was measured by using The Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale (Underwood, 2002) and the Hindi adaptation of the scale was done to use in Indian context (Cronbach alpha 0.79). Anxiety was assessed by using State, Trait and Free-floating Anxiety Inventory (Rastogi and Tripathi, 1986). The indices of internal consistency for both state and trait scale is 0.93 and 0.89 respectively. The data was analyzed with correlational analysis and hierarchical regression. The results indicated that spirituality is significantly negatively correlated with anxiety during pregnancy and positively correlated with antenatal outcomes in pregnant women. The results also revealed that anxiety during pregnancy is negatively correlated with antenatal outcomes. Thus, it can be concluded that women with high level of spirituality were more likely to have less anxiety and healthy antenatal outcomes.