Breastfeeding is one of the most important contributors to infant and maternal health. Despite the existence of many health benefits of breastfeeding, there has been a decrease in the rates and duration of breastfeeding in the country.
Mothers and in...
Breastfeeding is one of the most important contributors to infant and maternal health. Despite the existence of many health benefits of breastfeeding, there has been a decrease in the rates and duration of breastfeeding in the country.
Mothers and infants have to adapt themselves to the breastfeeding behavior for theirselves. In order to adapt to this behavior, mothers have to be able to independently evaluate their adaptation.
Breastfeeding is affected by complicated and multidimensional factors associated with the mother-infant relationship. Therefore, breastfeeding evaluation should include a holistic dimension and interrelationship between mothers and their babies. But developed instruments have evaluated mainly one part of a mother or a baby and a part of multidimensional factors, have been used in postpartum early weeks; further, because these instruments were mainly developed in a foreign country, their application to evaluate Korean mothers and babies from 4 weeks postpartum may be inadequate.
Therefore, the development of a new instrument is demanded to enable the continuous evaluation of the holistic adaptation of the mother and the infant from 4 weeks postpartum, by which time they have learned a basic breastfeeding skill, throughout the breastfeeding period.
This study aimed to develop an instrument that enabled the mothers to independently evaluate their adaptation to the breastfeeding behavior.
The instrument development process comprised the following steps: The conceptual framework was based on the Roy adaptation model. Based on the 4 adaptive modes of this model, the content domains were developed via literature review, review of instruments, and data acquired from the interviews of breastfeeding mothers and nurses in the maternity ward, clinic, and nursery. A total of 69 items belonging to 8 domains were generated.
A 5-point Likert response scale was used to generate responses, namely, strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree, strongly agree.
A panel of experts performed 2 rounds of review on the items. A total of 26 breastfeeding mothers reviewed the understanding and the degree of difficulty of sentences used in the questionnaire provided to them. Items with a content validity score (CVI) greater than 0.8 were adopted.
To assess the reliability and validity of the instrument, data was gathered from 329 breastfeeding mothers from 4 weeks postpartum in 3 public health centers and 1 pediatric outpatient ward in Seoul city and Gwangmyeong city, respectively.
The gathered data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 14.0. For extracting factors in the factor analysis for verifying the construct validity, principal component analysis and Varimax rotation was used. 4 adaptive modes, 8 factors, and 27 items were determined.
We confirmed 2 differences between the exclusively breastfeeding and partial breastfeeding groups and the past-breastfeeding experience and past-breastfeeding non-experience group in order to verify the construct validity. Those indicated a significant difference between the groups that were compared.
The correlation between the degree of breastfeeding adaptation and the degree of sub-domains of H & H lactation scale in order to verify the criterion-related validity, it showed a significant positive correlation with correlation coefficient r= .55 - .63(p< .01) respectively.
The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient was high (.82).
The result showed that this instrument to be employed for analyzing the factors associated with breastfeeding mothers and their infants would be one that evaluates the adaptation of breastfeeding mothers and their infants to the breastfeeding behavior with high reliability and validity.
Follow-up studies are required to further analyze the validity and reliability of this instrument, and present norm scores that correspond to the age of the baby.