Surveying Parents About Genome Screening of Newborns

A 10 minute baseline survey will be administered to parents of healthy newborn infants while in the hospital after delivery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, to be followed by a 25 minute survey 3-24 months later. We will measure parents' attitudes and preferences related to genome screening of newborns. The specific aims of this study are:

1. 1.To investigate whether parents' opinions regarding genome screening of newborns change between the first 48 hours post-partum and 3-24 months post-partum.
2. 2.To determine whether seeing hypothetical genome screening results affects parents' decisions regarding whether they would want genome screening for their newborn.
3. 3.We expect many parents to state initially (in the 48 hours post-partum) that they would elect to have genome screening for their newborn if it were available. In the follow-up survey, half of study participants will receive hypothetical scenarios in which they will need to struggle with the probabilistic and ambiguous nature of the information that could be derived from genome sequencing. We will examine whether this alters their preferences. We will also explore whether parents who receive hypothetical genome screening results scenarios are more likely to alter their preferences than parents who do not receive hypothetical scenarios.