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Цифровые нарративы беременности и доверие к медицине: тревожность и информационные практики
This article examines the relationship between using different sources of pregnancy information, subjective anxiety, and how online communities shape women’s interpretations of their pregnancy experiences. Digital communities are conceptualized as spaces where medical information is interpreted alongside personal experience, bodily sensations, and social expectations. They are also an informal support infrastructure that emerges in response to medical and socio-administrative uncertainty. The study employs a mixed-methods design, combining a quantitative analysis of an online survey of 201 women with experience of pregnancy and / or motherhood and a computer-assisted analysis of a corpus of 30 673 messages from pregnancy-related Telegram groups. Quantitative hypotheses were tested using nonparametric statistical methods. The qualitative component combined Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with subsequent thematic field interpretation to reconstruct the narrative repertoires of digital discussions. The quantitative analysis identified a statistically significant association between the intensity of information-seeking and subjective anxiety. Women who relied primarily on digital information sources reported higher levels of self-rated anxiety than those who relied mainly on healthcare professionals. However, the study design does not facilitate conclusions regarding the direction of causality in this relationship. The qualitative analysis demonstrated that digital communities fulfill informational, emotional-supportive, and navigational functions simultaneously. These communities help women to interpret medical, bodily and socio-administrative uncertainty, and encourage continual verification of medical information and collective discussion of potential risks. In these circumstances, a hybrid form of trust in medical expertise emerges: while healthcare professionals remain the primary source of legitimate knowledge, their recommendations are further validated by the collective experience shared within online communities. Our findings suggest that digital communities of pregnant women act as an informal support network during pregnancy, compensating for deficiencies in explanatory medical communication, emotional support, and access to clear information about social rights and benefits.