Psychometric Testing of a Scale to Measure Family Resilience Among Parents of Preterm Infants in the NICU

To evaluate the psychometric properties of the French-Canadian Communication, Organization, and Intrafamilial Beliefs in Neonatology (COCINL) NICU family resilience scale.

Scale validation design.

Two urban level III NICUs in Canada.

Participants included 88 parents of preterm infants who were hospitalized for more than 14 days.

We administered the COCINL scale along with validated questionnaires of psychological distress and of self-reported perception of family resilience. Psychometric testing included internal consistency, inter-rater reliability among couples, construct, divergent and exploratory criterion validation.

We found high internal consistency for each subscale (⍺ = 0.80 to 0.91) and for the total scale (⍺ = 0.94). Interrater reliability among 11 couples demonstrated moderate agreement, with an ICC of 0.54. Strong correlations between subscales (r = 0.73 to 0.85) supported the internal structure, however, not by exploratory factor analysis. Divergent validation was supported by moderate correlations with psychological distress scores (r = 0.24). Exploratory sensitivity and specificity analysis indicated that the COCINL scale aligns with participants' perception of family resilience (AUC = 0.75).

We found the psychometric properties of the COCINL scale to be adequate for measuring NICU family resilience for research purposes. The COCINL scale provides an assessment of family resilience during the NICU hospitalization that can be used to guide nursing interventions to promote parents' mental health in a family-centered care approach.