Assessing stressful life events associated with childbearing: The peripartum events scale

Abstract

A new measure, the Peripartum Events Scale (PES), was developed to index stressful events experienced by women in the peripartum period. The PES included 11 subscales assessing a variety of stressful events related to childbearing (eg medical risk factors, obstetric risk factors, progress in labour, method of delivery). An initial study to assess the reliability and validity of the measure was carried out with 98 women who were followed from the second trimester of preganancy through nine weeks postpartum. The PES could be objectively rated by two obstetricians (Pearson r = 0.92) and it was found to correlate significantly with pre- and postpartum measures of depression and women's self-ratings of upset with labour and delivery. It was concluded that the PES shows promise as a measure of peripartum stressful events for future research on psychological disorders of the puerperal period.