Approaches used in investigating family support in transition to parenthood

Early support has been acknowledged to be needed in the phase of transition to parenthood, and increasing knowledge is available on the factors enhancing this transition. The issue is to translate the knowledge into practices of preventive care. In this article, our aim is to map out recent research on supporting parents in maternity and child health care and to analyse how the subject of family support has been studied. The data consist of 98 scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals during 2000-09. Most of the reported research was Anglo-American, and fell within the academic fields of nursing studies, medicine and public health. The studies were categorized into three groups according to the epistemic perspective that was taken on the subject of family support, the studies focusing on (i) views and perceptions on family support of both clients and professionals (63 studies), (ii) the effectiveness of interventions (27 studies) and (iii) activities in the practices and processes of MCH (8 studies). First, the groups were described with regard to the study participants and the data and methods used. A bias towards the perspectives of risk groups and mothers was detected. Second, we examined the potential of different epistemic perspectives to describe care practices. The article contributes to the discussion about how to examine the practices and processes of health promotion and preventive care in such a way that the 'good practices' identified could be implemented in other contexts than the one studied.