Pregnancy anxiety scale: development, reliability and validity

Objective To develop anxiety scale suitable for Chinese pregnant women and evaluate its reliability and validity. Methods Based on existing research results and clinical experience, this study compiled pregnancy anxiety scale(PAS). A sample of 509 pregnant women were selected for investigation and 65 of them were randomly retested for test-retest reliability with 2 week interval.Item analysis was conducted to screen valid items.Then the construct validity of the scale was tested by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). Finally the reliability and criterion validity of the scale were evaluated using Cronbach's α coefficient, retest reliability coefficient and Pearson correlation coefficient. Results The PAS was composed of 27 items in four factors, including worry about delivery, worry about themselves, worry about fetal health and general anxiety.The four factors were extracted by EFA which could explain 62.48% of the total variance.Besides, the result of CFA demonstrated that the model fitted the data with well construct validity (χ2/df=1.89, RMR=0.04, RMSEA=0.06, IFI=0.92, TLI=0.91, CFI=0.92, PGFI=0.70, PNFI=0.74, PCFI=0.81). The score of the pregnancy-related anxiety scale and its factors scores were positively correlated with the scores of pregnancy-related anxiety questionnaire(PAQ) and childbirth attitudes questionnaire(CAQ). The correlation coefficients were 0.60-0.80 and 0.50-0.78 respectively (all P<0.01). The Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.93 for the total scale and that of the four factors ranged from 0.82 to 0.90. The test-retest reliability was 0.68 for the total scale and ranged from 0.54 to 0.75 for the four factors. Conclusion The PAS has a good reliability and validity, and it can be used as a valid tool to measure the anxiety level of pregnant women. Key words: Pregnant women; Anxiety; Pregnancy-related anxiety scale; Validity; Reliability