Quality of Life in Infertile Menopausal Women; Development and Psychometric of an Instrument

Abstract

Introduction: So far few studies have been designed to evaluate the quality of life instrument in infertile women. Aim: The present study was decided to design a valid and reliable instrument to assess quality of life in Iranian infertile women in postmenopausal period. Materials and Methods: Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied. The process was divided into three main stages including: instrument development, instrument validity and instrument reliability. Instrument development used three main steps, including determining content domain, item generation and instrument construction. Instrument was validated using face validity, content validity and factor analysis. Both internal consistency and test–retest reliability methods were used to confirm the reliability of the questionnaire. Results: During content development, domain step obtained 83 items in all demission of life in infertile women. In the qualitative and quantitative face validity, 25 items had item impact less than 1.5 and were excluded from the questionnaire. In the content validity section, 17 items failure to obtain necessary score based on Lawshe formula, so were excluded from the questionnaire. Overall, 8 factors were extracted by factor analysis test. However, 67.38% of the total variance was explained by 4 factors, other 4 next factors explained the remaining 32.62% of the total variance. Totally, 34.01% of rotation variance was explained by first factor and 24.37% by second factor. In questionnaire internal consistency, 8 items had Cronbach’s alpha 0.942. Conclusion: Therefore, we recommend the use of present questionnaire as a valid tool to evaluate the quality of life in infertile women during postmenopausal period.

Keywords

• instrument development
• instrument reliability
• instrument validity