Factorial invariance of pregnancy-specific anxiety dimensions across nulliparous and parous pregnant women

Abstract

The 10-item version of the Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Questionnaire-Revised was developed based on a sample of nulliparous women. Whether this measure is also a valuable tool for future research on pregnancy-specific anxiety is unclear. Our study tested for invariance of this measure across nulliparous women and parous women by using a dataset of 6004 women pregnant up to 35 weeks. Results showed that whereas the factor structure of the 10-item version of the Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Questionnaire-Revised was noninvariant, removing item 8 from the measure created a measure with invariant factor loadings that can be used for all pregnant women.