[Item selection for postnatal quality of life scale]

To select items to compose the final scale from 101-item pool for assessment of postnatal quality of life which was developed by the authors before.

Ten experts in maternal and child health scored the importance of every item. A total of 200 women at 0-12 months after childbirth who took their babies for vaccination or clinic services were investigated by the item pool, and 10% of them were retested in one month. Based on these data, items in the item pool were screened by following principles respectively: score of item importance, factor loading, variation coefficient, Cronbach Alpha, correlation coefficient of item with domains (2 types) and test-retest correlation coefficient. Then we summarized the screening results of these methods, and retained the items which could be selected in at least five methods.

The numbers of items deleted in these seven screening methods respectively were: 39 items in experts scoring method; 43 items in factor analysis method; 49 items in variation analysis method; 50 items in Cronbach Alpha method; 26 items in correlation coefficient method 1; 9 items in correlation coefficient method 2; and 11 items in test-retest method. After summarizing these screening results, 60 items were selected. In order to simplify the scale,only kept 2 items in each aspect which had more frequency retained. Finally, 40 items remained in the postnatal quality of life scale.

This is the first Chinese scale for evaluating postnatal quality of life of women. It needs to establish the validity and reliability in the future.