Background:

Negative experiences during delivery are associated with women disempowerment, postpartum depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and low breastfeeding rates. The Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) is a 23-item screening tool useful for discovering women with a negative experience in their birth process and avoids future complications in following pregnancies or couple's relationships.

Objective:

The general objective is to adapt the Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) to the Spanish population and to obtain its psychometric characteristics.

Methodology:

The cultural adaptation process consisted of forwarding translation and back translation into Spanish, conceptual equivalence evaluation by a committee of judges, comprehensibility evaluation and cognitive interview to a postpartum group. Psychometric characteristics were obtained throughout the factorial analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's test of sphericity and Cronbach alpha level.

Results:

After complete the adaptation process, the committee of judges made several adjustments to achieve a better comprehension in the Spanish population, avoid misunderstandings or offensive words in the target language. 138 participants were needed to calculate factor analysis. The KMO (0.838) and Bartlett test (p < 0.001) confirmed the adequacy of factor analysis and the Scree plot showed 6 factors with the predictive power of 73.75% supported total variance. Internal consistency was assured using a Cronbach α of 0.896.

Conclusions:

Data from this study demonstrate that the Spanish version of QACE is a valid and reliable measure of childbirth experience in the Spanish population.

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