Objective: To select items to compose the final scale from 101-item pool for assessment of postnatal quality of life which was developed by the authors before.
Methods: Ten experts in maternal and child health scored the importance of every item. A total of 200 women at 0-12 months after childbirth who took their babies for vaccination or clinic services were investigated by the item pool, and 10% of them were retested in one month. Based on these data, items in the item pool were screened by following principles respectively: score of item importance, factor loading, variation coefficient, Cronbach Alpha, correlation coefficient of item with domains (2 types) and test-retest correlation coefficient. Then we summarized the screening results of these methods, and retained the items which could be selected in at least five methods.
Results: The numbers of items deleted in these seven screening methods respectively were: 39 items in experts scoring method; 43 items in factor analysis method; 49 items in variation analysis method; 50 items in Cronbach Alpha method; 26 items in correlation coefficient method 1; 9 items in correlation coefficient method 2; and 11 items in test-retest method. After summarizing these screening results, 60 items were selected. In order to simplify the scale,only kept 2 items in each aspect which had more frequency retained. Finally, 40 items remained in the postnatal quality of life scale.
Conclusion: This is the first Chinese scale for evaluating postnatal quality of life of women. It needs to establish the validity and reliability in the future.