Development and co-creation of the Baby-related Anxiety and Behavior Inventory (BABI): An experience sampling measure

Many women experience anxiety in the postpartum period, often with specific worries related to their newborn. Most existing anxiety questionnaires do not take into account the specific nature of postpartum- and baby-related anxiety symptoms and often omit anxiety-behaviors. Here, we share the process of constructing the Baby-related Anxiety and Behavior Inventory (BABI), a questionnaire catered to the Experience Sampling Method.

The BABI questionnaire was developed in four different phases: 1) construction of a draft questionnaire, 2) focus groups with mothers (N = 14, 5 groups), 3) focus groups with clinical experts (N = 6, 2 groups), and 4) a pilot study. For the pilot study, mothers (N = 47) completed the BABI questionnaire on their phone 5 times a day for 7 days (35 total). We gathered data on feasibility, compliance rate, completeness and experience of the mothers.

Thematic analyses of the focus groups identified 10 key facets of baby-related anxiety: checking behavior, reassurance, compulsivity, sensitivity to baby cries, fear of becoming like their own parents, fear of hurting baby, feeling judged by others, fear for health of baby, fear of baby becoming parentless, and sleep issues and baby-related nightmares. In general, mothers were very satisfied and showed excellent compliance rates (92 %). Most mothers reported that they would recommend other mothers to participate in a similar study (97.9 %) and that felt the questionnaire covered all aspects of postpartum anxiety.

The BABI is a very well-tolerated questionnaire to measure momentary experiences of baby-related anxiety in the postpartum period.