CUIDAR-MaPre scale validation: A tool to measure the caregiving competence of mothers of premature infants

To determine the validity and reliability of the CUIDAR instrument in mothers of premature infants.

Cross-sectional validation study. The study was conducted in two stages. First stage: literature review, semantic adequacy, and judgement with 7 experts to establish content validity. In the second stage, the psychometric properties of the instrument were evaluated by exploratory factor analysis after its application to 207 mothers of premature infants.

In the expert's judgment, the content validity index was higher than 0.8, which indicated adequate representativeness of the items. Agreement between judges was moderate with a Fleiss Kappa of 0.51. The exploratory factor analysis established the adequacy of the sample with a Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin statistic of 0.859 and Bartlett's test of sphericity 2953.9 (p = 0.000). After considering various scenarios, a 7-dimensional, 33-item model explained 57.9% of the variance, with an overall Cronbach's alpha of 0.852 and adequate goodness-of-fit indices. The goodness-of-fit tests allowed us to establish through statistical significance χ² = 0.01, CFI = 0.92, BIC ≥ 10 and RMSEA = 0.05 indicating that the model has a good fit.

A new model was identified based on the items and dimensions of the CUIDAR instrument, which allows us to assess the competence of mothers to care for their premature children in a valid and reliable way.