Construct and content validity of the Greek version of the Birth Satisfaction Scale (G-BSS)

Abstract

Background: ‘Birth Satisfaction’ is a term that encompasses a woman’s evaluation of her birth experience. The term includes factors such as her appraisal of the quality of care she received, a personal assessment of how she coped, and her reconstructions of what happened on that particular day. Her accounts may be accurate or skewed, yet correspond with her reality of how events unfolded. Objective: To evaluate properties of an instrument designed to measure birth satisfaction in a Greek population of postnatal women. Study design: We assessed factor structure, internal consistency, divergent validity and known-groups discriminant validity of the 30-item Greek Birth Satisfaction Scale – Long Form (30-item G-BSS-LF) and its revised version the 10-item Greek-BSS-Revised (10-item-G-BSS-R), using survey data collected in Athens. Participants: A convenience sample of healthy Greek postnatal women (n = 162) aged 22–46 years who had delivered between 34 and 42 weeks’ gestation. Results: The 30-item-G-BSS-LF performed poorly in terms of factor structure. The short-form 10-item-G-BSS-R performed well in terms of measurement replication of the English equivalent version as a multidimensional instrument. The short-form 10-item-G-BSS-R comprises three subscales which measure distinct but correlated domains of: (1) quality of care provision (4 items), (2) women’s personal attributes (2 items), and (3) stress experienced during labour (4 items). Key conclusions: The 10-item-G-BSS-R is a valid and reliable multidimensional psychometric instrument for measuring birth satisfaction in Greek postnatal women.

Keywords:

• Birth Satisfaction Scale (BSS)
• childbearing women
• Greek
• intranatal
• labour
• psychometric properties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Home assessment was described by Hollins Martin and Fleming (2011) in extensive detail in their original BSS paper as critically important in helping women to feel in control of their labour.

2. It should be noted that the 10-item G-BSS-R demonstrates no evidence of non-normality based on the criteria highlighted earlier in the paper. However, as this version of the scale is embedded in the long form, which does demonstrate non-normality, and that responses to the short form may be influenced by responses to the longer version, a consistent approach to data analysis between both versions of the measure was chosen.