Psychometric Evaluation of the Pre-pregnancy Fear Questionnaire and its Relationship with Marriage Duration

Background: Pregnancy is the biggest event in a woman’s life. It is not a pleasant occasion for all women, and in cases where it is not managed properly, the pregnant woman and her relatives face a lot of difficulty and stress. It can be said that the greatest stress in every woman’s life is pregnancy, and fear of delivery is an important problem during pregnancy and after childbirth. The general objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the pre-pregnancy fears questionnaire and the relationship with marriage duration. Methods: The present study consisted of two parts: the first part consisted of the test, and the second part of the descriptive-correlational study. 150 couples who referred to the health center of Izeh city in the fourth trimester of 2018, were selected by multistage cluster sampling method. Then, the questionnaire of fear of delivery before the pregnancy (10 questions) was implemented on them. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 24 software. Results: The findings indicated that the factor load was higher than 0.3 and the questionnaire was saturated with two factors. These two factors explained the percentage of variance by about 60.314 for women and 69.937 for their husbands. Factor analysis based on the correlation matrix in the sample group was justified and in addition, the initial output also showed that the amount of dimerman correlation matrix is a non-zero number that indicates that the factors can be extracted based on these data. Correlation findings also showed that the fear of delivery with marriage duration for women with a correlation coefficient of -0.459 and for their husbands with a correlation coefficient of -0.447 have a reverse relationship with the significance level of 0.000. The inverse relationship between education and age with fear of pre-natal delivery is one of the side findings of this study. Conclusion: Persian standardized questionnaire for fear of delivery before pregnancy has acceptable psychometric properties in Iranian sample. There is also a significant relationship between pre-pregnancy fear and marriage duration.