Objective

To assess the following scales' psychometric characteristics: Perceived Stress (PSS), Family and Friends Support (AFA-R), Depression-Hamilton (HDRS), Depressive Symptomatology (CES-D), Violence and Index of Severity (EV) among Mexican populations, with and without pre-eclampsia.

Method

Descriptive and psychometric study. A web search was conducted to decide on which scales use. Nurses applied the scales to 104 hospitalized post-partum women with and without pre-eclampsia. Cronbach alpha was measured to assess reliability. Validity was confirmed by a group of experts and by a pilot study. Principal components, Kaiser, and varimax factor analyses were carried out.

Results

Each scale had internal consistency-acceptable level: PSS .718 and EV .740; good level: AFA-R .911, CES-D .869 and HDRS .806. Content validity was assessed as PSS: 96.42%, EV: 100%, AFA 100%, CES-D: 98.75% and HDRS: 92.64%. The factor structure was well distributed. Each factor had few important weights, and the rest were close to zero. Each variable was not saturated except in one, and barely in two, factors, thus variance was almost not shared. PSS, with 6 factors, had an explicative power of the total variance of 72.23%; AFA-R, with 3 factors and explicative power of 74.19%; HDRS with 6 factors and explicative power of 70.58%; while CES-D, with 6 factors too, had an explicative power of 72.87%. The EV scale had a variance of zero.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that the scales PSS, AFA-R, HDRS, and CES-D, due to their reliability, validity, and usefulness, theoretically work well to assess the different variables among the group of studied women. Another factor analysis on the EV scale should be considered for a similar sample.