Translation and Validity of Infertility Stigma Scale in Infertile Women

Background: In a society women with infertility background, even when embryo transfer to the uterus express it as the best feeling and Sense of peace in the world and the existence of the child will lead to strength the marital relationship. The privation of child is a stigma that a person will experience by herself, her relatives and the community. Therefore, it is necessary to have a valid, durable and applicable tools in order to measure the experienced stigma in infertile women who may endanger their mental health. Due to the lack of a comprehensive question-naire to measure infertility in society, this study aimed to trans-late and validate infertile stigma women s infertility measure . Materials and Methods: In this methodological study, initially the translation of the Infertility Inventory questionnaire which was designed by John Lei, first translated in to Persian, and then back translated by specialists. The infertility stigma scale (ISS)consists of 4 subcategories: self-devaluation (7 items), social with drawal (5 items), public stigma(9 items) and family stig-ma(6 items). In the next step, the validity of the questionnaire was done through face validity, content validity (content va-lidity index and content validity ratio), construct validity (con-firmatory factor analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Inter-nal consistency and test-retest methods were used to estimate the reliability of the scale. The participants in this study were 350 referring infertile women to a selected infertility center af-filiated to Iran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran. The Sampling was done available in 4 months. Data analysis was performed using SPSS software version 16 and Liserl software version 8.8.Results: The 27- items ISS were been into the validation phase after the translation of the questionnaire. It was performed af-ter determining the content validity ratio and content validity index, a confirmatory factor analysis. The confirmatory factor analysis did not fit well; thus, five factors were identified by exploratory factor analysis and the some items position was transferred in the factors. After consultation with the research team, the name of the factor change to self- devaluation(7 item), public stigma(7 item),self-stigma (4 item),social stigma(4) and family stigma(5 item).The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the instrument was found to be 0.96, and the external reliability, as evaluated by the test-retest method and the infraclass correla-tion, was (ICC = 0.93).Conclusion: The results of validation showed that this ques-tionnaire with 5 domains and 27 phrases was a reliable and val-id scales for investigating infertility stigma in infertile women in Iran

Keywords:

Infertile Women , Translation , Scale , Psychometrics , Stigma