Evaluating maternity services: how representative are data collected usinga pregnancy diary?

As a part of the evaluation of Nottingham's response to the Changing Childb irth initiative, a cohort of pregnant women were asked to complete diaries, recording their perceptions of events and their feelings over the entire p regnancy period. Before the study began, we were concerned that the diary c ompletion rate could be low and that those completing would be unrepresenta tive of the population. in this paper, we report the nature of responses to the diary and show that these problems were far less serious than was init ially expected. A high degree of coverage was achieved, implying that large numbers of women were sufficiently motivated to maintain detailed records over many months. The research suggests that the diary is a viable method o f data capture in such circumstances.