“Even though they insult us, the delivery they give us is the greatest thing”: a qualitative study contextualizing women’s experiences with facility-based maternal health care in Ethiopia

Background Globally, amidst increased utilization of facility-based maternal care services, there is continued need to better understand women’s experience of care in places of birth. Quantitative surveys may not sufficiently characterize satisfaction with maternal healthcare (MHC) in local context, limiting their interpretation and applicability. The purpose of this study is to untangle how contextual and cultural expectations shape women’s care experience and what women mean by satisfaction in two Ethiopian regions. Methods Health center and hospital childbirth care registries were used to identify and interview 41 women who had delivered a live newborn within a six-month period. We used a semi-structured interview guide informed by the Donabedian framework to elicit women’s experiences with MHC and delivery, any prior delivery experiences, and recommendations to improve MHC. We used an inductive analytical approach to compare and contrast MHC processes, experiences, and satisfaction. Results Maternal and newborn survival and safety were central to women’s descriptions of their MHC experiences. Women nearly exclusively described healthy and safe deliveries with healthy outcomes as ‘satisfactory’. The texture behind this ‘satisfaction’, however, was shaped by what mothers bring to their delivery experiences, creating expectations from events including past births, experiences with antenatal care, and social and community influences. Secondary to the absence of adverse outcomes, health provider’s interpersonal behaviors (e.g., supportive communication and behavioral demonstrations of commitment to their births) and the facility’s amenities (e.g., bathing, cleaning, water, coffee, etc) enhanced women’s experiences. Finally, at the social and community levels, we found that family support and material resources may significantly buffer against negative experiences and facilitate women’s overall satisfaction, even in the context of poor-quality facilities and limited resources. Conclusion Our findings highlight the importance of understanding contextual factors including past experiences, expectations, and social support that influence perceived quality of MHC and the agency a woman has to negotiate her care experience. Our finding that newborn and maternal survival primarily drove women’s satisfaction suggests that quantitative assessments conducted shortly following delivery may be overly influenced by these outcomes and not fully capture the complexity of women’s care experience.

Gender and Trajectories of Marital Breakdown: Accounts of Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada

The relatively sparse literature has documented various challenges international migration poses to martial stability, yet we know little about immigrant women's experiences with marital breakdown. Drawing data from a qualitative study of Chinese economic immigrants to Canada, this article explores women's experiences of navigating the processes of this life circumstance, and of how gender—including their senses of changing gender roles in post-immigration and postmarital contexts—plays out in these trajectories. The results of this exploratory study illustrate the value of transcending dichotomous conceptions of the relationship between gender and migration, and of opening spaces in which to better understand immigrant women's increasingly diversified life trajectories and the range of barriers they encounter along the way. The study also reveals multiple opportunities for social work contributions: tackling systematic barriers to settlement, facilitating social support in the community, and recognizing individuals’ diverse trajectory potentials (including the potential for this typically unwelcome event to be integrated as personal growth and transition).

“Asking the Woman Question” in Case Study Research

Case study research provides the researcher with the opportunity to decide the most convincing epistemological orientation. Such versatility is nonetheless embedded in the assumption of objectivity contends G. Griffin in Difference in View: Women and Modernism, which speaks of an “abstract masculinity” intended here as the assumption of universal humanity where men's and women's experiences are melted into one experience. Case study research, this contribution contends, even when about women, hinders the experience of women, an experience that is always situated, relational, and engaged. In other words, ontologically, it is argued here, the reality of women's lives is absent from the domain of case study research because the language adopted when framing case study research is still very much a language that talks about women, but it does not allow women to speak.

Witnessing Women: Quo Vadis, Cinema?

The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide. The Diary of Diana B. (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience.

Women’s pains of punishment: Experiences of female offenders serving community sentences in Lithuania

Using the concept of ‘pains of punishment’, the article analyses the experiences of Lithuanian women serving community sentences. Our study demonstrates that women experience the universal pains of punishment associated with stigmatisation, shame, and the inconveniences caused by punishment, as well as constraints and anxieties about impending imprisonment. Furthermore, the complex context of their social environment (relationships with partners, children, and other loved ones) contributes to these pains. In contrast to some previous studies, the Lithuanian women’s experiences do not fall under the category of ‘demanding clients’ since the research participants do not think of the Probation Service as an institution that could meet their needs and provide them with assistance.