Validity and Reliability Study of Perception of Insufficient Milk Supply Questionnaire for Turkish Society

Abstract

Perceived insufficient milk causes mothers to feel that they are a failure in nutrition and breast-feeding, and they stop breast-feeding earlier. Early detection of these perceptions is important. The objective of this study is to adapt the Perception of Insufficient Milk Supply Questionnaire into Turkish mothers and conduct the validity and reliability analyses of the scale. The study was set in the neonatal unit of a university hospital in an eastern province of Turkey between June 2013-February 2014. Two hundred mothers, whose babies were hospitalized in neonatal unit, participated. The study included mothers who had no problem with breast-feeding, actively breastfed their infants, and clinically had a sufficient amount of milk. It was determined that mostly age group of mothers were 19-35 (91.5%); 39.5% were primary school graduates; a great majority of them (79.0%) were unemployed. The linguistic equivalence of the scale was primarily examined, and then its validity and reliability analyses were performed after confirming the linguistic equivalence. We conducted the language validity of the Perception of Insufficient Milk Questionnaire, which was adapted into Turkish. The following values were determined regarding the Turkish version of the Perception of Insufficient Milk Questionnaire: Test-content validity index 0.87, item total correlation scores 0.70 and 0.87, retest correlation value 0.81, and a Cronbach α coefficient of 0.82. According to these results, it could be asserted that Perception of Insufficient Milk Questionnaire is a valid and reliable assessment instrument for Turkish society.