PREGNANT MOTHERS’ UNDERSTANDING ON MATERNITY BRAS

A properly designed, well-fitting maternity bra would be an excellent solution that could provide much relief to the wearer for the changes in the breast over the nine month period of pregnancy. Thus, this research is focused on investigating the pregnant mothers' understanding and preferences regarding maternity bras. The individual views were gathered through a well-structured questionnaire that was distributed among pregnant mothers living in the urban and suburban areas of Kandy and Colombo in Sri Lanka. A descriptive analysis technique was adopted to analyze the collected data. Separate interviews were carried out with five pregnant mothers to clarify their responses to the questionnaire. Results highlight that most of the mothers are looking for new bra types that could provide both greater comfort and adjust to the size change to overcome the inconvenience they have faced with regular bras that could not cope with the breast changes. Unfortunately, most of them were not fully aware of maternity bras and their features due to the unrestricted availability in the local market. Of those mothers who had a limited awareness of these matters, their priority preference has been on the choice of fabrics when purchasing a bra. Preference for using underwired bras dropped while preference for bras without hooks & eyes increased during the last stage of pregnancy.