the relationship between spousal support and health behaviors of pregnant women in turkey

Background & aim: gaining health behaviors suitable for women during pregnancy is important for the pregnant woman to complete it in a healthy way. this study was carried out to examine the relationship between spousal support and health behaviors of women during pregnancy. methods: this cross-sectional study was carried out on 230 pregnant women who attended a hospital in adıyaman province, turkey for routine care between 2019 and 2020 and were selected by random sampling method. a demographic questionnaire, spousal support scale (sss), and health practices in pregnancy questionnaire-ii (hpq-ii) were used as data collection tools, which were completed through structured interviews. the mann-whitney u test, kruskal- wallis, pearson correlation, and logistic regression analysis were used to analyze the data. results: in terms of scale overall scores, pregnant women took 73.84±11.22 and 121.42±13.37 from sss and hpq-ii, respectively, besides, a moderately significant positive correlation was found between the overall scores of the two scales (r=0.577, p= <0.001). as a result of logistic regression analysis, pregnant woman’s age (or:0.050), years of education (or:0.102), spouse’s years of education (or:0.081), marriage duration, number of pregnancies (or:0.116), previous live births (or:0.157), and prior miscarriage (or:0.025) were found to be important risk factors for health behavior. conclusion: spousal support during pregnancy is related to health behaviors and women with more spousal support exhibit high-quality health behaviors. therefore, it is recommended that women during pregnancy be questioned about their spousal support and to be counseled in this regard to experience a safe pregnancy.