Strengths and limitations
The originality of this study is its approach based on women’s
well-being scores. Well-being is a key determinant of health-related
behaviours.24 The scale used in our study combines the
hedonic approach (positive emotions, satisfaction with one’s life) with
the eudemonic approach that includes the perception of usefulness and
confidence in the future, which may be particularly questionable in the
current context of media gloom-mongering. Most of the other tools
published so far have assessed negative psychological reactions such as
anxiety and stress, or even pathological reactions such as depression
and/or post-traumatic stress disorder. The main strengths of our study
are that the results are based on a voluntary general population survey
with the control group selected by a propensity score as a
representative sample of our source sample. Thus, this study is based on
a convenience sample with overrepresentation of high educational and
socioeconomic levels with stable partner situations, who are at lower
risk of stress. On the one hand, our method makes it unlikely that a
differential selection bias was present. On the other hand, the
selection bias inherent in any population-based survey probably modifies
our results in the direction of overestimating women’s well-being in our
study.