A THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR-BASED STRUCTURAL MODEL FOR BREAST-FEEDING

Background: Breast-feeding is the recommended method of infant feeding because it is clearly associated with health benefits for infants and their mothers. Yet, many women who initiate breast-feeding fail to me et their own personal goals or recommended standards for duration of b reast-feeding. Objective: To refine a Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) based structural model for explaining variability in breastfeeding int ention and duration. Method: The study design was prospective, multico rrelational, and longitudinal. Out of the total sample of 635 women, 6 02 mothers of healthy, full-term infants provided complete datasets ov er the entire course of their breast-feeding experience and these data sets were used in the modeling analyses. Simultaneous multisample anal ysis of covariance structures was used to develop the model. Results: The resulting TPB for Breast-Feeding (TPB-BrF) describes the rational, motivational processes of the original TPB, but reconfigures the rela tionships among them, for homemakers (TPB-BrF/H), women employed half- time or less (TPB-BrF/EL), and women employed more than halftime (TPB- BrF/EM). Mothers' early postpartum ratings of adequacy of milk supply and stimulus conditions of maternal education and breast-feeding knowl edge were included in the TPB-BrF to better explain breast-feeding out comes. Model complexity increased with employment effort. Conclusion: The TPB-BrF is a comprehensive, theoretically based, empirically verif ied model that can serve as a useful heuristic for understanding the p ersonal motivational components of breast-feeding behavior.