ABSTRACT
The Prenatal Distress Questionnaire (PDQ) was developed among English-speaking women in the United States to assess specific worries and concerns during pregnancy. Our aim was to analyze the factor structure of the PDQ, using confirmatory factor analysis, and assess its convergent validity in Spanish women. A sample of 233 pregnant women with ages ranging from 19 to 42 years in the south of Spain (Europe) (January 2015 – March 2016) completed the translated PDQ, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Symptom Checklist-90-revised (SCL-90-R). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure supporting the original PDQ factor structure (χ2 (31) = 55.43, p = 0.004; CFI = 0.96; RMSEA = 0.058; WRMR = 0.702). The Spanish PDQ significantly correlated with the PSS and SCL-90-R (r’s 0.18–0.49, p’s < 0.05), providing evidence of convergent validity. These results illustrate that the stress dimensions investigated by the PDQ adequately represent pregnant women’s distress across a different cultural context and corroborate the psychometric properties of this instrument previously demonstrated in English-speaking women. The Spanish version of the PDQ can be used by clinical practitioners to evaluate specific worries and concerns women experience during pregnancy.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the pregnant women and the community midwives who participated in this study.
Compliance with ethical standards
This study was approved by the Humans Ethics Research Committee of the University of Granada.
Financial disclosures
This study is a part of a Doctoral Thesis and was supported by the I+D Project “PSI2015-63494-P” of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and co-funded by FEDER funds/European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Conflicts of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Supplementary material
Supplementary data can be accessed here.