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Bouras, G., Mexi-Bourna, P., Bournas, N., Christodoulou, C., Daskalaki, A., Tasiopoulou, I. and Poulios, A. (2013) ‘Mothers’ expectations and other factors affecting breastfeeding at six months in Greece’, Journal of Child Health Care, 17: 387. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367493512468358

This article looks at a breastfeeding study which uses interviews within a positivist paradigm. The research was conducted in Greece.

Bouras et al. (2013) comment that although the World Health Organization recommends that babies should be exclusively breast fed until the age of 6 months, in Greece, as with many other countries in the minority world, it is a small minority of babies that are exclusively breast fed for this long. The article describes research designed to reveal some of the factors that influence mothers’ decisions about how to feed their babies.

• Read through the abstract and the conclusion. This will give you a good idea of the research and help you put things in context when you read the whole article.
• Read through the introduction. What are the advantages of breastfeeding? Despite the WHO recommendations, many mothers do not exclusively breastfeed until the age of 6 months. What factors that influence mothers’ decisions about feeding have been suggested?
• What is the aim of the study?
• Read through the ‘Materials and methods’ section.
  • How was the sample chosen? How many mothers were recruited onto the study?
  • What sort of interviews were used?
  • How many times were the mothers interviewed and by whom?
  • When reading this section, you may find the following links helpful in putting the research into context:
  • 10 Steps of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative: https://www.unicef.org/documents/baby-friendly-hospital-initiative
  • International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241541601
• Read through the statistical section. Don’t worry if you don’t understand statistics, you will be able to find out the results when they are discussed. The important point here is that the data from the structured interviews have been reduced to numerical data and subjected to statistical analysis. This is a quantitative analysis and suggests that the researchers are operating within a positivist paradigm.
  • Read through the discussion section and list the main findings.
  • The conclusion looks at the implications of the findings and makes suggestions to improve the numbers of mothers who exclusively breast feed until 6 months. What recommendations have been made?