Methods Overview

There were 2 core phases of this project: informational interviews as well as data collection and analysis.

Informational Interviews

11 people were interviewed at the beginning of this project. The interviewees consisted of doulas, nonprofit leaders, doula trainers, and insurance liaisons.

Additionally, The Childbirth Collective, a nonprofit in Minnesota, also provided a dataset from 2011-to 2018 with over 6000 doulas reporting their most recent birth. Key results can be found here.

The informational interviews were conducted in a semistructured format. They were approximately 30-45 minutes in length and participants were offered 20 dollars in the form of an Amazon gift card as compensation. The interviews were analyzed through a traditional thematic coding method. All participants were given the choice to stay anonymous.

The interview guide can be found here.

Data Collection

The 5-7 minute survey was created in Qualtrics with both multiple choice and free response questions. A $5 compensation in the form of a Starbucks gift card was offered to each participant who completed the survey. This survey was distributed through email and social media. Not all questions were required, particularly free-response questions. 130 participants were used in the final analysis.

The overall description of the participants and descriptive statistics of each question can be found here.

Data analysis was conducted through Python in Jupyter Notebooks and R Studio.