Development, and evaluation of validity and reliability of an instrument to measure women's decision-making style and strategies for abortion or continuing with an Unintended Pregnancy

Many women throughout their life cycle experience unintended pregnancy and need to decide on continuing or terminating it. In addition, elective abortion is illegal and forbidden in some countries and hence, unintended pregnancy is a matter of great sensitivity and importance for women who live in such countries. Currently, there is no measurement tool for assessing women’s decision-making status facing an unintended pregnancy. This study aimed to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a measure for assessing women’s decision-making about their unintended pregnancies.
The present study was a sequential exploratory study. In the first section, the decision-making process of unintended pregnant women was explored using the content analysis approach. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview by 23 participants in Tabriz. In the second section, items were formed based on the meaning units, which extracted from qualitative section. The validity of the instruments was assessed using face, content and constructs validity. For evaluation of face validity, qualitative and quantitative (item impact score) methods were used. The content validity was assessed by 15 experts. The construct validity was assessed by exploratory factor analysis. The sample size was calculated by multiplying the number of items by ten. Internal consistency, and Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were used to assess the reliability of the instruments.
The instrument had 4 components and 27 items. The components of the instrument included: avoidance-justification strategies, resistance against accepting the pregnancy, analytical strategies and confirmatory strategies. Four components explained 50.81% of variance. The instrument was found to have high internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.86) and adequate test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.94).
The present instrument a valid measure related to unintended pregnant women’s decision-making.