French adaptation and validation of a scale measuring the fear of childbirth

Objectives. - The fear of childbirth, a central aspect of tokophobia, recently started to capture the attention of the scientific community as a potential determinant of obstetric and post-natal complications. However, studies on this subject are still few and this can be partly explained by the lack of validated instruments, especially in French. This paper presents the results from two studies designed to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a French version of the Traumatic Event Scale (TES), adapted to assess fear of childbirth (Soderquist et al., 2004 [21]). Method. - The first study presents details regarding the development of this scale and checks the quality of the resulting items as well as their internal consistency, convergent validity and factorial validity. This study relied on a sample of 65 mothers with at least one child under the age of 36 months. In the second study, the psychometric properties of the instrument developed in Study 1 were tested more systematically on a sample of 204 women who were at the time experiencing their first pregnancy. Results and conclusion. - The results from the first study show adequate psychometric properties, strong correlations with measurements assessing worry, and support a five factor model. Results from this second study replicated the results from the first one on the basis of confirmatory factor analyses. Findings presented in these studies confirm that this instrument presents very good psychometric properties as a measurement of the fear of childbirth in pregnant women. (C) L'Encephale, Paris, 2011.