Factors of the 'Taegyo' of Korean Pregnant Women: Self Care of Pregnant Women Based on Oriental Folk Behavior

Chang, Soon Bok; Park, Young Joo; Choi, Youn Soon; Chung, Chae Won

Abstract

All human health behavior is deeply rooted one's beliefs or value system usually encompassed within the culture in which they live. The Taegyo, based on Oriental folk medicine, is defined as the behavior and self care of pregnant women administered for herself and her fetus(unborn child). Taegyo is believed to be desirable, effective, and healthy behavior by most of Korean pregnant women. It is essential in our contemporary culture, to ascertain what the components of Taegyo are and to integrate them into current, western nursing care, particularly in the area of prenatal care. 910 Korean women were the subjects of this study, who were in a gestation period of pregnancy between 10 weeks to three months postpartum. The subjects were selected by clustered sampling from 10 representative cities in Korea. Data was collected from February 10 to March 30 1995 by a constructed questionnaire which consisted of 95 items. The questionnaire was developed through three steps such as content analysis, calculation of content validity index, and pretest. Data was analyzed by descriptive statistics and rotated matrix factor analysis with pc-SAS. The mean age of the subjects was 28.9 years; 36.5% of them were employed and the mean income per month was about 2000 dollars. The component of Taegyo was clustered into five factors such as fetus psychological stability(equity), fetus personality development, maternal-fetal interaction, fetus intellectual development and physical health promotion. The variance of each factor were 23.7%, 8.3%, 4. 7%, 4.1%, and 3.3% respectively in that order. The Eigen value of each factor was 13.03, 4.57, 2.60, 2.23, and 1.83 respectively. It was found that the Taegyo is an unique and holistic self care behavior of Korean pregnant women. Therefore it has been concluded that this study has broadened the understandability of the implications the Taegyo. It is suggested that further studies on the effects of the Taegyo are needed to provide a scientific basis for professional maternity nursing.