Maternal representations in mother-infant relationship drawings by third trimester primigravidae

This mixed-methods art-based study probed pictorial expressions in mother and infant relationship drawings. The participants were 45 women in the third trimester of their first pregnancies, who produced a mother-infant relationship drawing and filled out self-report questionnaires relating to maternal representation. The drawings were subjected to Phenomenological Analysis, which resulted in a list of ten dichotomous categories of drawing phenomena. The differences in maternal representations between the two groups in each category were examined non-parametrically using two-sample Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. The consolidation of qualitative and quantitative information revealed significant differences between the groups of drawings in some of the categories. This partially confirmed the hypothesis of the presence of an association between the pictorial data and the quantitative data, and highlights the difficulty of combining artistic data and quantitative declarative information.