Indonesian educated middle-class fathers’ preferences in pregnancy services at a private hospital

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using in-depth interviews with six educated fathers whose wives were pregnant at the time of the study, the present research aims to interrogate how their preferences in pregnancy services have been developed and avidly exercised using their sets of cultural capital. Following the presented research analysis, the theorizing of education as cultural capital by Pierre Bourdieu allows the author to further explore the complexity of the relationship between medical service preferences and facilities with the respondents’ social status as educated middle class actors. Moreover, access to and enjoyment in using the medical facilities and services of this private hospital is a social symbol desired by the respondents in order to reinforce and reinvigorate their social status. In addition, hospitals as providers of medical facilities and services play a role in accommodating the process of cultural capital activities of these highly educated expectant fathers. The inclusion of private hospitals in this study should also be considered as a symbol of social inequality in the provision of health services in Indonesia. The respondents place themselves within everyday social interactions, that relate naturally to the world, and represent the preoccupied active presence through which the world imposes its presence.