About the study

If a woman has a mental illness during pregnancy or up to 2 years after childbirth, it is called perinatal mental illness. This can have a long-term effect on children and has a high cost to society. Mental health support can help, but women from religious and ethnic minorities use mental health services less often than other women. Sometimes they find the support isn’t suitable or easy to find. We need better ways to reach and support these women.

The focus of the study will be on reducing loneliness. Loneliness can cause perinatal mental illness or make it worse.  Loneliness means having fewer people to spend time with or talk to than you’d like. Some people feel lonely even if they have lots of family and friends because they don’t feel comfortable talking to them about difficult topics. Sometimes people feel lonely if they feel different to others.

Research funded by Phase One of the Three Schools Mental Health Research Programme found that perinatal walking groups could help reduce loneliness. Consultation has shown that Muslim women would be interested in taking part in walking groups. However, we don’t know how these walking groups could be designed to make them as useful and enjoyable as possible for perinatal Muslim women. This is because Muslim communities have been overlooked in research. This study aims to ask these communities how perinatal walking groups could work for them. We will then co-design a walking group to test out in research in the future. 

Here is the plan for our research:

An online Research Advisory Group (RAG) will guide every part of our study. This group will be made up of Muslim women and the practitioners and organisations who support them. We will use an approach that has worked before to hear from communities who haven’t taken part in research. We will employ Muslim women in Sheffield as Community Research Link Workers (CRLWs). We will train them to recruit other Muslim women to hear their views.

We will talk to 32 Muslim women in four focus groups (group research interviews) to hear what they think would help them. We will also talk to up to 20 professionals who support Muslim women (practitioners) in two focus groups. We will ask them what they would need to help run walking groups.

Based on their thoughts, we will hold workshops to create a perinatal walking group intervention using a method called the Person-Based Approach. This method has been used before to design a similar intervention for women experiencing perinatal mental health difficulties. The RAG and the CRLWs will also come to these workshops. We will share our findings in academic papers and conferences, but also in blogs.