Page 57 - Zero for nine: Reducing alcohol use during pregnancy via health counselling and Internet-based computer-tailored feedback

Partner support to prevent prenatal alcohol us
Methods
Procedure
Respondents of this cross-sectional study were partners of pregnant
women, recruited through Dutch midwifery practices in September-
October 2009. Midwives are important care providers for pregnant
women and their partner as 75% of the Dutch women at the beginning
of their pregnancy and 36% of the Dutch women throughout their
entire pregnancy receive care only from a midwife (Wiegers, Van der 3 Velden, & Hingstman, 2005). All midwifery practices in the Netherlands (approximately 500) were asked to distribute flyers among their clients’
partners with information about the purpose of the study and a link to an online questionnaire developed with Tailorbuilder software (OSE, the Netherlands). Each flyer contained an informational section plus a login-code to gain access to the online study questionnaire.
After three weeks a reminder email was sent to all midwifery practices. The questionnaires were filled in anonymously; the name of the respondent as well as the name of the attending midwifery practice were not collected. Ethics approval for this study was granted by a human research ethics committee (METC Atrium MC – Maaslandziekenhuis; 08-N-50).
Questionnaire
The online questionnaire consisted of 115 questions and was a modification of questionnaires used in previous studies applying the I-Change Model (Dijkstra, De Vries, & Bakker, 1996; Dijkstra, De Vries, & Royackers, 1998a; Hoving, Mudde, & De Vries, 2007a).
The first set of questions assessed predisposing factors, which included demographics, drinking behaviour and partner’s desire that his spouse abstains from alcohol use. Demographics were assessed with three items: age, education (1 = primary school/basic vocational school;
55