The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe nurses' uncertainty on pregnant women facing threatened abortion and explore how nurses had dealt with them. Participants were 20 nurses who have worked in the obstetrics unit more than 3 years. Data from semistructured interviews were analyzed through sorting into categories by themes. The nurses experienced “uncertainty” associated with whole image of a pregnant woman facing threatened abortion, relationships with pregnant woman and diagnosis and treatment of threatened abortion. Though the nurses had uncertainty, they dealt with pregnant women facing threatened abortion using “nurses' resources” including skills, clinical judgements, clinical experiences and/or rules.“Deal with pregnant women” consists of ‘leading pregnant woman to be sure’, ‘being with pregnant women’, ‘dealing with pregnant women ambiguously’, and ‘dealing with pregnant women superficially’. These findings suggest as follows: 1) nurses' resources is concerned in flexible dealing with pregnant women and 2) it is important that nurses provide care which leads pregnant women to find significance in her experience in spite of ending pregnancy.

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This study participatory examination (the contructional examination method) to observe how the use of different fetal heart rate monitoring methods affect the continuity of action taken by midwives for women under their care during delivery of first stage. It consists of analysis of individual scenes of examinations.
The midwives cared for the low-risk popurations.
A total of 67 examination scenes were obtained, consisiting of 33 scenes of intermittent monitoring with the stethoscope and 34 scenes in which continuous monitoring was conducted.
Analysis of diagrams of each scene led to the following conclusions.
The scenes were arranged in two categories, one in which information gathering and care-giving were involved, and the other in which information gathering only was involved. It was found that when the stethoscope was used, the percentage of observations both information gathering and care-giving were significantly greater than with continuous monitoring.
It was also noted that with continuous monotoring, the use of an obstetrics care unit restricted both the woman's ability to change potions and the care option open to the midwife, and that there were cases in which the midwife's time was taken up with adjustment of the equipment rather than giving care.

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The present study is undertaken to investigate how mothers felt when they heard the cries of their babies (within one week and one month after birth) and what actions they took.
The subjects of this study were 16 women who delivered normal neonates at a private clinic in Ishikawa Prefecture. How these mothers dealt with the cries of their babies was investigated by means of an interview, which was carried out in a semi-controlled method. The interviews were recorded on tape with each mother's consent. The interviews were performed twice (within one week and one month after birth). Qualitative analysis of the mothers' responses to their babies' cries yielded the following results.
The responses of mothers to their babies' cries within one week after birth were found to contain the following six elements: emotional responses, cognitive responses, intellectual interpretation of the cries, concrete countermeasures, intuitive understanding of the cries, and evaluation of the baby's character and temperament.
These emotional responses were affected by the mother's stability, the mother's awareness of her role as a mother, the babies' temperament reflected in their cries, and the time since the previous lactation.
Mothers attempted to interpret the meaning of their babies' cries. This attempt involves two elements (time and features of the cry).
This study revealed what mothers felt when hearing their baby's cries and what action they took to deal with their baby's cries at two points after delivery (within one week and one month after delivery). The findings of this study may be useful to nurses when supporting mothers in the care of babies within one week and one month after birth.

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The purpose of this study was to clarify the concept of social support for women who miscarried.
The framework of this study was based on the model of House (1981) that formulated the four types of social support function (emotional support, appraisal support, instrumental support and informational support).
The data were gatherd using the semi-structured interviews with 17 women who miscarried.
Content analysis conducted showed there could be three categories as social support “Giving emotional support for the experience of miscarriage”, “Giving means to keep physical comfort”, and “Giving information to cope with the experience of miscarriage”.“Paying respect to privacy”, sub-category of the emotional support, is the peculiar support for women who experience loss like miscarriage.
The data suggested that three categories were not separated clearly, but overlapped each other.

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The purpose of this investigation is to compare the process through which men become mature fathers with their first babies and that of mothers and to clarify factors most influencing the mental development of fathers. With 178 couples, our investigation was done separately with fathers and mothers when their children had just become 18-months old. Its effective solution rate was 45.6%. The result shows that, fathers got high scores on comparatively easier to do activities such as talking to babies, carrying them in the arms, and playing with them as well as supporting their wives mentally while they made low scores on concrete child care activities and housework. Both mothers and fathers made high scores on factors concerning parental development. Both of them picked out the factor “the purpose to live” first. But from the second factors, there exist difference. As for the scores, mothers always got higher ones then fathers did. The paternal development was much affected not by how much wives expect their husbands to share housework and child care but by how much fathers' fell a sense of responsability and how they actually took part in housework and child care.

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