Validation of Parenting Stress Scale for Mothers of Premature Infants in Iran

Background and Preterm birth is a stressful situation for parents and the infant, which may lead to difficulties in mother-infant relationships and disturb emotional and cognitive development in infants. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factorial structure, validity, and reliability of the Parenting Stress Scale for Mothers of Premature Infants.
The research sample included 500 mothers of premature infants selected via convenient sampling. They were divided into two groups (n=250 per group). Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to evaluate the reliability of the scale. Exploration and confirmation factor analysis were applied to investigate the validity of the scale.
The Parenting Stress Scale for Mothers of Premature Infants was found to have an acceptable internal consistency and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.918. Test-re test reliability coefficient was 0.833 after 15 days. Three factors of parenting stress, mother-infant turbulent interaction, and parental expectations were obtained under the varimax rotation. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis also confirmed that the structure of the scale had an acceptable fit to the data, and all indicators confirmed the fitting goodness of this model.
Findings showed that this scale has appropriate psychometric properties which could be suitable in evaluating parenting stress for mothers of premature infants