Chloé Michoud

Despite recommendations against using commercial sleep monitoring devices to prevent sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), their use is increasing among parents. This study explores mothers’ discursive constructions about the usage of baby monitors during their infants’ sleep. By analysing 43 online posts from the website Mumsnet through Critical Discursive Psychology, two key discourses were identified: ‘surveillance as a good mothering practice’ and ‘risk management via technology’. The first repertoire illustrated how mothers incorporate digital surveillance into their daily routines, using baby monitors as essential tools to enact ‘good mothering’. The second repertoire shows how technology is portrayed as a beneficial tool for mothers and parents, helping in childcare and enhancing safety. In conclusion, baby monitors are seen as essential for managing mothering risks, but their pervasive use can create challenges, raising concerns about whether mothers should adapt to these tools or if the tools should better serve parents’ needs.

Multiple influences such as climate change, environmental, and social factors, have been increasing the incidence of infectious disease outbreaks. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how people make sense of such events. Our study focuses on 100 Swiss-Italian participants during the initial COVID-19 pandemic wave, investigating how they navigated this period. We collected “Stories of Life,” personal narratives about their experience and analyzed them with Thematic Analysis. Results show that over a third of the participants made sense of the pandemic by framing it as a time for personal growth. Our themes illustrated the importance of relationships, resilience, and appreciation of time. These findings align with existing literature on personal growth domains and underscore the significance of relational health in adversity. We discuss personal growth during a pandemic, emphasizing the need to consider socio-demographic characteristics and supportive social contexts, which can create inequalities in circumstances promoting growth.

Practices related to health are circulated widely on YouTube. With a health psychology perspective, we present a study to understand health and wellbeing-related practices of a group of popular, professional YouTubers from the audio-visual content they produce. We first identify, via polytextual thematic analysis, six thematic health-related categories, and use them to label a set of 2500 YouTube videos. Agreement among three independent annotators was acceptable for these health-related categories. We then present an analysis of speech transcriptions and visual content, demonstrating that distinctive patterns exist for these health-related categories. These include linguistic markers and specific scene types and objects. Finally, with an interpretability focus, we study the feasibility of classifying health-related video categories in a binary setting, and compare performance across features, finding best accuracy for linguistic features (74-87%), and various patterns of linguistic and visual relevance used for the classification of health categories. The results shows promise to support mixed-methods research in health psychology, combining manual analysis and data-driven methods. More generally, our work contributes to the understanding of current health practices shared and promoted on social video.