Page 14 - Non-western women in maternity care in the Netherlands • Exploring ‘inadequate’ use of prenatal care and the experiences of care professionals

reasons that the remaining twelve practices gave for declining to participate were few or no non-western clients or being too busy.
During the course of data collection, purposive sampling was adopted. Midwives taking a compulsory training course for intercultural midwifery care organised by their employers were approached at the end of the training by the first author, who also gave a presentation about her study during the training course. Nine midwives showed interest and were later approached by e-mail. In the end, two were willing to be interviewed. To achieve variation in our sample, final recruitment was targeted at specific categories of midwives, such as those with little work experience. Three midwives from these target categories were recruited via midwifery researchers. Interested midwives received an information letter by e-mail. Those willing to be interviewed made an appointment by e-mail or telephone with the first author.
Individual interviews were held with thirteen midwives. The midwives were all women, aged between 23 and 58. Eleven were of native Du tch origin and two of non-western origin. All the midwives were qualified to work in the Netherlands. Twelve of them were practising in primary care, while one was practising four years in secondary care after having worked for three years as a primary care midwife. As we were interested in the experiences of primary care midwives, the interview with this last midwife focused only on her experience in primary care. Ten midwives were practising in urban areas, which are known to have large numbers of non-western clients, whereas three midwives were practising in rural areas. Their experience with non-western clients ranged from 11 months to 19 years.
All individual interviews (likewise the focus group interview, see below) were conducted by the first author; a female Dutch researcher whose interest in this topic was awakened by her own non-western (Surinamese) background. She studied medicine and public health, and had a training in qualitative research methods in medical anthropology. She presented herself as a researcher to the interviewees, who were all unfamiliar to her beforehand. Interviewees were explained that the interviews were conducted as part of a larger study exploring factors affecting midwifery care utilisation by non-western women in the Netherlands.
The focus group interview
For the focus group, the head of a regional midwifery group (Verloskundigen Kring) located in an urban area was asked permission to
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