Maria Brann
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COVID-19 Birth Stories
In this year-long project, Professor Brann and her research partner, Professor Jennifer Bute, first conducted focus groups with women across the country who had given birth during a time when their state or local governments had issued stay-at-home orders because of the COVID pandemic. Then, they followed up a year later by interviewing the same women individually to learn more about raising a newborn during a pandemic.
The researchers found that the isolation of stay-at-home orders and changes in health care policies, such as limitations on hospital visitors and in-person appointments, had a profound effect on women. Women discussed in detail the mental health challenges they faced, such as postpartum depression and anxiety, that they felt were heightened because of the pandemic. Women also discussed the challenges of navigating who had access to visit or hold their newborn, which involved keeping their babies safe while contending with family expectations about seeing the baby. The women who participated in the study were grateful for the opportunity to connect with other women with similar experiences to know that they are not alone. They provided recommendations for helping pregnant women and new moms who are navigating motherhood in an unprecedented time, and even spoke to the media about this project so that other women would feel supported.
Professor Brann's translation of research into supportive groups for new mothers is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING their RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.
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Browsing Maria Brann by Author "Bute, Jennifer J."
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Item Breaking Bad News: A Randomized Trial Assessing Resident Performance After Novel Video Instruction(Cureus, 2021-06-05) Shanks, Anthony L.; Brann, Maria; Bute, Jennifer J.; Borse, Vyvian; Tonismae, Tiffany; Scott, Nikki; Obstetrics and Gynecology, School of MedicineIntroduction; Delivering bad news to patients is an essential skill for physicians, which is often developed through patient encounters. Residents in our program participate in objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) on an annual basis to evaluate their skills in these scenarios. Our objectives were to develop an educational video and determine if an educational video provided to residents prior to OSCEs would improve performance. Methods: Previous OSCEs were reviewed to identify best practices and to create a four-minute video highlighting the "do's and don'ts" of delivering bad news. Residents in two post-graduate year (PGY) classes were randomized to watch the video prior to or after a standardized patient encounter. Three masked reviewers assessed resident empathy, attention, and understanding on 10 five-point Likert scales and assigned a total score (scale: 0-50). Hedges' g was used to assess mean scores and effect size. Results: A total of 17 residents participated in the evaluation: nine in the pre-OSCE video group and eight in the control group. Residents randomized to the video prior to the patient encounter had a mean score of 37.01 (SD=3.6). Residents randomized to the control group had a mean score of 35.38 (SD=4.85). Hedges' g was 0.37 (95% CI: -0.59 to 1.33). Conclusion: Residents randomized to the video group had a small increase in OSCE performance, which was not statistically significant. The novel video was helpful and addresses the need for a quick pre-assessment educational tool, though interns and graduating medical students may be a more appropriate target audience for instruction.Item Co-Ownership of Private Information in the Miscarriage Context(2014-12) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, MariaPregnancy loss due to miscarriage is a pervasive health issue. Although talking about the miscarriage experience with friends and family members has been linked to better adjustment, revealing this loss can be difficult because discussing a miscarriage often makes people uncomfortable. Moreover, couples often manage this information jointly as they decide whether to share the miscarriage with people outside the dyad. We conducted in-depth interviews with couples to explore the nature of co-ownership in the miscarriage context and to identify the privacy rules that couples develop to manage this information. We found that couples frame miscarriage as a shared but distinct experience and that both members exert rights of ownership over the information. Couples' privacy rules centered on issues of social support and others' need to know about the loss. Even though couples described their privacy rules as implicitly understood, they also recalled having explicit conversations to develop rules. We discuss how the management of co-owned information can improve communication and maintain relationships.Item Communicating to promote informed decisions in the context of early pregnancy loss(Elsevier, 2017) Brann, Maria; Bute, Jennifer J.; Communication Studies, School of Liberal ArtsObjective. To evaluate residents’ ability to engage standardized patients in informed decision making during a pregnancy loss scenario. Methods. Forty patient encounters between interns and standardized patients were coded to assess informed decision-making practices, exploration of unexpressed concerns, and support provision. Results. Interns engaged in minimum informed decision making but did not address all of the communicative elements necessary for informed decisions, and most elements were only partially addressed. Patients in this study did not receive information about all management options, their concerns were not addressed, and there was limited support communicated for their decision. Conclusion. This study offers an initial assessment of a communicative approach to evaluate and improve decision making during early pregnancy loss. A comprehensive approach to making informed decisions must include discussion of all management options, exploration of patient preferences and concerns, and support for the patient’s decision. Practice Implications. Healthcare providers could benefit from communication skills training to communicate more effectively with patients to help them make more informed decisions.Item The Discursive Dynamics of Disclosure and Avoidance: Evidence from a Study of Infertility(2013-02) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, MariaRecent research and theorizing about privacy management suggests a need to consider discursive dynamics and interpretations of meaning in conversations involving disclosure, topic avoidance, secret-keeping, and other privacy management processes. In the following study, I drew on a specific set of theoretical assumptions as the basis for an investigation of privacy management in the context of infertility. Based on in-depth interviews with 23 women coping with infertility, results reveal the varied ways that private topics arose in conversations (e.g., discloser initiated conversations, responses to requests for information), the diverse ways that women concealed or revealed their struggles with infertility, and the multiple dilemmas they faced in managing private information about their fertility problem. I discuss the results in light of the extant literature on managing private information about sensitive issues and suggest that scholars must continue to focus on conversational dynamics to understand fully how privacy management processes unfold in everyday conversations.Item Exploring societal-level privacy rules for talking about miscarriage(Sage, 2019) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, Maria; Hernandez, Rachael; Communication Studies, School of Liberal ArtsCommunication privacy management (CPM) theory posits that culturally specific understandings of privacy guide how people manage private information in everyday conversations. We use the context of miscarriage to demonstrate how societal-level expectations about (in)appropriate topics of talk converge with micro-level decisions about privacy rules and privacy boundary management. More specifically, we explore how people’s perceptions of broad social rules about the topic of miscarriage influence their disclosure decisions. Based on interviews with 20 couples who have experienced pregnancy loss, we examined how couples described miscarriage as a topic that is bound by societal-level expectations about whether and how this subject should be discussed in interpersonal conversations. Participants reflected on their perceptions of societal-level privacy rules for protecting information about their miscarriage experiences and described how these rules affected their own privacy management decisions. We discuss these findings in terms of CPM’s theoretical tools for linking macro-level discourses to everyday talk.Item Let’s break the silence about miscarriages(2014-10-10) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, MariaItem “Nobody Thinks Twice About Asking:” Women with a Fertility Problem and Requests for Information(2009-12) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, MariaFor women with a fertility problem, responding to questions about childbearing, pregnancy, and the nature of infertility is a salient issue. In this study of talking about infertility, women described their experiences in handling such requests for information. Results suggest that requests come in a variety of forms, that women attribute multiple and potentially conflicting meanings to such requests, and that requests can elicit a variety of responses. From a communication standpoint, such inquiries suggest the varied ways that conversational partners can attempt to elicit disclosive information, thus enabling or constraining the emergent nature of the interaction.Item Pregnancy(2014) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, MariaItem Qualitative Assessment of Bad News Delivery Practices during Miscarriage Diagnosis(SAGE, 2020) Brann, Maria; Bute, Jennifer J.; Foxworthy Scott, Susanna; Communication Studies, School of Liberal ArtsMiscarriage is one of the most common pregnancy complications health care providers discuss with patients. Previous research suggests that women’s distress is compounded by ineffective communication with providers, who are usually not trained to deliver bad news using patient-centered dialogue. The purpose of this study was to use a patient-centered approach to examine women’s experiences with and perspectives of communication during a miscarriage to assist in the development of communication training tools for health care providers. During focus groups, 22 women who had experienced miscarriage discussed video-recorded standardized patient-provider interactions and recalled communication during their own miscarriages. Results of a pragmatic iterative analysis of the transcripts suggest training techniques and communication behaviors that should guide education for providers to deliver the diagnosis of and treatment options for early pregnancy loss, such as demonstrating empathy, creating space for processing, checking for understanding, and avoiding medical jargon and emotionally charged language.Item Tensions and Contradictions in Interns’ Communication about Unexpected Pregnancy Loss(Taylor & Francis, 2019) Bute, Jennifer J.; Brann, Maria; Communication Studies, School of Liberal ArtsEarly miscarriage is an unexpected pregnancy complication that affects up to 25% of pregnant women. Physicians are often tasked with delivering the bad news of a pregnancy loss to asymptomatic women while also helping them make an informed decision about managing the miscarriage. Assessing the communicative responses, particularly the discursive tensions embedded within providers’ speech, offers insight into the (in)effective communication used in the delivery of bad news and the management of a potentially traumatic medical event. We observed and analyzed transcripts from 40 standardized patient encounters using Baxter’s relational dialectics theory 2.0. Results indicated that interns invoked two primary distal already-spoken discourses: discourses of medicalization of miscarriage and discourses of rationality and informed consent. We contend that tensions and contradictions could affect how women respond to the news of an impending miscarriage and offer practical implications for communication skills training.