The Stirling Maternal Health Research Group, part of the Stirling Behavioural medicine Research group, is a group of multidisciplinary academics and researchers who all recognise that the pre-conception, antenatal and postnatal periods offer a unique opportunity to enhance the health and wellbeing of women, benefiting their current and future health. Our vision is to encourage and support women to engage in healthy lifestyles before, throughout and beyond their pregnancy. Our reseaech aims to develop robust, high quality research and knowledge of how to optimise maternal health behaviours.
Health psychology involvement in antenatal and postnatal care is relatively new and multidisciplinary working is essential to enable high quality, impactful research which is relevant to practice. Therefore, it is hoped that this website will act as a platform to welcome researchers and health professionals working in similar areas to get in contact to develop this area of research and maximise the impact it can have for women around the world.
My research centres around the application of health psychology into maternity care.
Kirsty Darwent CPsychol, PhD, is a Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist with a particular interest in health contexts. Her current research interest is infant feeding but she is interested more widely in families and systems in health and wider public services.
Pat Hoddinott is Chair in Primary Care at the University of Stirling, and works in the Nursing Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals (NMAHP) Unit and across both Stirling and Inverness campuses.
I am the Royal College of Midwives (Scotland) Professor of Midwifery and I am based in the Nursing Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Research Unit.
The development and initial validation of a screening scale for antenatal anxiety
Epidemiology, Health Psychology, Behavioural Science
Quantitative Social Research, Qualitative Social Research, Developmental Psychology
Developing Asset-Based Approaches to Support Behaviour Change Among People During Times of Stress.
Lecturer in the Faculty of Health Science and Sport. Nurse and Midwife with current NMC and AHPRA registration
Provisional Thesis Title: "Achieving Seamless Services". To critically examine the impact of Scotland’s framework for children’s services upon the wellbeing of children in Scotland.
I am interested in the development, testing and application of behaviour change theory and interventions for health.
My research falls into 4 broad areas, all using health psychology models and theories with a broad social-cognitive focus. I am particularly interested in ‘testing’ theories which are often developed in an academic context, by putting them into practice in applied settings.
A range of researchers at University of Stirling have interest in antenatal and postnatal health behaviours, including:
Trish's research interests are broadly in the area of psychological and behavioural aspects of physical activity, sedentary behaviour and health.
I have research interests around healthy eating,physical activityand understanding population level interventions to change health behaviours.
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Ronan O'Carroll is a Clinical and Health Psychologist who is broadly interested in behaviour, health, disease and medicine. He is past President of the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine.
Below is a selection of our external collaborators who have been involved similar research. We welcome any new collaborators who may be interested in similar areas of research:
Debbie's main research interests are teenage pregnancy, pregnancy-related behavior change, pregnancy as a teachable moment, maternal obesity and the impact of socio-economic environment on health behaviours.
Ellinor is a health psychology researcher interested in theory, behaviour change during and after birth and issues related to maternal obesity. She has worked on several evaluations of NHS funded weight management services for pregnant and postnatal women using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Marie’s research interests include the role of exercise, in particular walking, on health.
Marlene Sinclair is Professor of Midwifery Research, Editor and founder of the Royal College of Midwives, Evidence Based Midwifery Journal and President and founder of the Doctoral Midwifery Research Society.
Dr Liddle originally graduated from the University of Ulster with a first class honours degree in Sports Science in 1994
I am a qualified midwife and have clinical experience based in the UK and overseas.
Plesae contact us to discuss collaboration.