engleski

Maternal Postpartum Stress Scale: A New Measure of Stress in the First Postpartum Year

The literature review on postpartum stressors reveals that postpartum experience may include different problems and stressful events. Unfortunately, measures of stress during postpartum are scarce. Also, they are excessively long, too specific or cover only the first six weeks postpartum. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop and validate a new measure of postpartum specific stress, as a self-report scale. A 46-item scale was developed based on previous scales and qualitative studies on postpartum-specific stress. In an online cross- sectional survey, 603 women in the first postpartum year filled in the Maternal Postpartum Stress Scale. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21 ; anxiety subscale) were also administered to test construct validity. Factor structure, reliability, and different aspects of validity were examined. The number of items was reduced to 22, and a three-factor structure was established with the exploratory factor analyses. Factors were best labelled as Personal needs and fatigue (fatigue, lack of time for personal needs and socialization, household chores), Infant nurturing (infant health and nurturing), and Body changes and sexuality. The reliability of the total scale and all subscales was good. Good convergent and divergent validity was established. The subscales were discriminative for primiparous and multiparous mothers. In conclusion, the new 22- item Maternal Postpartum Stress Scale is a valid and reliable measure of postpartum specific stress. Both researchers and practitioners can use the scale to assess the stress intensity that postpartum mothers experience.

stress ; postpartum ; assessment ; validation ; mothers

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