Prior to the study, primiparous pregnant women presented to the outpatient clinic for routine pregnancy control were introduced with free prenatal education classes and they were invited to participate in the study.

Primiparous women who volunteered to participate in the study and met the inclusion criteria were included in the study and they formed the experimental and control group. Control group did not receive antenatal education and they received prenatal care service routinely provided at the polyclinics of the same hospital.

Antenatal education group The primiparous pregnant women assigned to the intervention group participated in education classes in groups of 8-10 people. Pregnant women were given structured antenatal education twice a week for two weeks (240 minutes). The total education time was 16 hours. Each session comprised 150 minutes presentation of theoretical knowledge, 45 minutes warm-up and stretching exercises, and 45 minutes relaxation exercises.

Antenatal education group The primiparous pregnant women assigned to the intervention group participated in education classes in groups of 8-10 people. Pregnant women were given structured antenatal education twice a week for two weeks (240 minutes). The total education time was 16 hours. Each session comprised 150 minutes presentation of theoretical knowledge, 45 minutes warm-up and stretching exercises, and 45 minutes relaxation exercises.

The W-DEQ Version A was developed by Wijma et al. (1998) in order to measure the fear of childbirth experienced by women during pregnancy. It is a six-point Likert-type scale and consists of 33 items. The responses given to the items on the scale are scored from 0 to 5, where 0 refers to 'extremely' and 5 refers to 'not at all'. The minimum and maximum possible scores to be obtained from the scale are 0 and 165, respectively. As the score increases, so does the fear of childbirth experienced by women (Wijma et al., 1998). Korukcu et al. (2012) examined the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of W-DEQ with women in the last trimester of pregnancy, and found a Cronbach׳s alpha of 0.89 and split-half reliability of 0.91.

The short form of the Childbirth Self-efficacy Inventory has two subscales: outcome expectancy and efficacy expectancy (Ip, et al., 2008). Efficacy expectancy (EE) is a personal conviction about one's ability to successfully perform the required behaviors in a given situation, and outcome expectancy (OE) is the belief that a given behavior will lead to a given outcome. Each subscale consists of 16 items and yields a score between 16 and 160. Higher scores indicate higher levels of efficacy or outcome efficacy for birth. The CBSEI has strong psychometrics, with good internal consistency (α = 0.82) (Ip, et al., 2008). Psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the CBSEI were tested (Ersoy, 2011) and internal consistency was similarly high (α = 0.90).

The validity and reliability study of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21), which was developed by Lovibond and Lovibond (1995), was conducted by Akın and Çetin (2007). The scale consists of 42 items. The scale has a four-point Likert-type rating: (0) Never, (1) Rarely, (2) Frequently, usually, and (4) Always. In the directive of DASS-21, individuals are asked to respond to each item based on how suitable it is for them considering the time period including the previous 30 days. There are 42 items in the DASS-21, 14 of which are related to depression, 14 anxiety, and 14 stress dimensions. The high scores obtained from each of the dimensions of depression, anxiety, and stress indicate that the individual has the relevant problem. The scale has no reverse item and the total score of the scale is expressed between 0 and 42 for each sub-dimension.