ABSTRACT
Once you have become a midwife, being a researcher is not the first thing that comes to your mind. Midwifery is an exciting profession. It is fascinating how a new life begins, and the individuality of a woman’s experience is challenging. Newly qualified midwives, therefore, will primarily choose to work with pregnant women, their children and families in everyday practice. Practising midwifery not only involves scientific knowledge, but also art and caring sensitivity, in which midwives use their own personality in order to achieve positive effects in caring for mothers and their families. While these magic elements are essential to care, they have been hard to capture and evaluate in studies (Enkin and Chalmers 1982). In everyday practice, however, midwives are often confronted with standardising, medical research. Many midwives have experienced this kind of research, in contrast to the individual approach needed for their work. Being a researcher, therefore, seems like following a different profession. Midwifery research addresses midwives’ ways of working and aims to improve midwifery practice. If this happens, research can be as fascinating as midwifery. Well-known midwife researchers started their first research with a question that arose from practice, and thus contributed to the reduction of unnecessary interventions during childbirth.
