SERENO, Sara; MAROCO, João; CORREIA, Mª Jesus    LEAL, Isabel. Portuguese version of the mother and baby scales (mabs). []. , 13, 2, pp.447-458. ISSN 1645-0086.

This article present the Portuguese version of The Mother and Baby Scales (Wolke, 1995). The MABS was developed to assess the mother's confidence in the care of baby, in particular, assesses the negative emotions of newborns and their behaviors alert, and perceptions of parents about their confidence providing care to the baby. The original version of the instrument divides in two major areas “Your baby and your feelings” and “Feeding of my baby” and it’s constituted by 64-items distributed by 8-sub-scales. The evaluation of the psychometric properties was done from sample of 430 mothers. The 8 factor model showed a poor fit to the variance-covariance matrix of scale’s items (X²/df=2.69; CFI=0.68; GFI=0.71; TLI=0.66; RMSEA=0.06; P(RMSEA<=0.05)<0.001). To improve the factorial validity of the 8 factor structure, items with factor loadings smaller than 0.4 and modification indices suggesting correlations with different factors from those were the items originally loaded were removed. The improved model with only 30 of the original items showed a good fit to the 8 factor structure (X²/df=1.87; CFI=0.88; GFI=0.87; RMSEA=0.03; P(RMSEA〈0.05)=1). The stability of the new reduced 30-item scale was tested on an independent sample of 200 mothers, aged 18 to 45. Invariance analysis demonstrated the external validity of the 8-factor/30-items structure (Factor weights: 〈X²(22)=32.61; p=0.06; Covariances: 〈X²(36)=30.36; p=0.73). The reliability proved high most dimensions and low only two.

: Mother's confidence; Newborns behavior; MABS; Portuguese version.

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