Validation and categorization of the Parental Belief Scale of pre-term newborn babies

Abstract

Hospitalization of the premature newborn baby in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a significant source of maternal stress, due to factors that interfere with the mother-infant interaction and affect the family dynamics, altering the parental role and interfering with the parental care capacity. This study aimed to describe the process of translation, cultural adaptation, psychometric validation and categorization of the scores of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Parental Belief Scale (NICU: PBS) for Brazilian Portuguese, with parents of hospitalized premature children. This is a methodological validation study with the following steps: translation, back-translation, analysis of the judges committee, pre-test, reexamination of scores and evaluation of psychometric properties. The construct validity was verified in a total sample of 99 fathers and/or mothers of preterm infants by confirmatory and exploratory factorial analysis. The content validity performed by the judges’ committee was adequate, with 90 % agreement for the translation and Kappa of .71. The test-retest obtained an Intraclass Correlation Coefficient of .98 and Cronbach's Alpha of .92. In the exploratory factor analysis a structure with three factors was found: trust in the parental role, parent-child interaction and parental knowledge, which explained 56 % of the variance. The parents' Beliefs Scale obtained satisfactory content and reliability, and it was adequate for the application with parents of hospitalized pre-term infants.

Keywords

• Unidades de Terapia Intensiva Neonatal, estudos de validação, prematuro, relações pais-filho, cuidado da criança