Adaptation of the fear of birth scale to Turkish: validity-reliability study

This is a research conducted to determine whether the Turkish form of the Childbirth Fear Questionnaire developed by Fairbrother et al. (2021) is a valid and reliable tool. This research is a methodological type of study. The sample group consists of pregnant women who agreed to participate in the study, are in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of their pregnancy and are planning a normal birth. Personal information form and Fear of Childbirth Scale were used to collect research data. The research sample consisted of 298 pregnant women who applied to Adıyaman University Training and Research Hospital between June and December 2023. Evaluation of the data was analyzed with SPSS for Windows 22 package program and LISREL 8.80 package program. Back translation technique was used to ensure the language validity of the scale. To ensure content validity, opinions of 10 experts were taken and the content validity index was calculated as 0.98. As a result of explanatory factor analysis, it was determined that the factor loadings of all items of the Fear of Childbirth Scale were between 0.849 and 0.430 and the explained variance was 66.456%. The confirmatory factor analysis result was found to be acceptable as x2/sd 5.19, GFI 0.96, AGFI 0.96, CFI 0.96, RMSEA 0.059 and SRMR 0.062. Cronbach alpha coefficient was determined as 0.961. It was determined that item correlation coefficients ranged between 0.308-0.627. It has been determined that the Turkish form of the Childbirth Fear Questionnaire is a valid and reliable tool and can be used in other studies.