Development of a questionnaire for assessing the childbirth experience (QACE)

Due to its potential impact on women's psychological health, assessing perceptions of their childbirth experience is important. The aim of this study was to develop a multidimensional self-reporting questionnaire to evaluate the childbirth experience.

Factors influencing the childbirth experience were identified from a literature review and the results of a previous qualitative study. A total of 25 items were combined from existing instruments or were created de novo. A draft version was pilot tested for face validity with 30 women and submitted for evaluation of its construct validity to 477 primiparous women at one-month post-partum. The recruitment took place in two obstetric clinics from Swiss and French university hospitals. To evaluate the content validity, we compared item responses to general childbirth experience assessments on a numeric, 0 to 10 rating scale. We dichotomized two group assessment scores: "0 to 7" and "8 to 10". We performed an exploratory factor analysis to identify underlying dimensions.

In total, 291 women completed the questionnaire (response rate = 61%). The responses to 22 items were statistically significant between the 0 to 7 and 8 to 10 groups for the general childbirth experience assessments. An exploratory factor analysis yielded four sub-scales, which were labelled "relationship with staff" (4 items), "emotional status" (3 items), "first moments with the new born," (3 items) and "feelings at one month postpartum" (3 items). All 4 scales had satisfactory internal consistency levels (alpha coefficients from 0.70 to 0.85). The full 25-item version can be used to analyse each item by itself, and the short 4-dimension version can be scored to summarize the general assessment of the childbirth experience.

The Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) could be useful as a screening instrument to identify women with negative childbirth experiences. It can be used as both a research instrument in its short version and a questionnaire for use in clinical practice in its full version.