The Development of the DDads Questionnaire: Awareness, Knowledge and Attitudes of the General Population Towards Paternal Depression

Abstract

Objectives: Paternal perinatal depression affects ~10% of new fathers and is known to have a negative impact on men's relationship with their partner as well as with their baby. The attitudes of the general population toward paternal depression have received scant attention in the scientific literature. A better understanding of paternal depression might improve the health literacy of the population and also assist professionals and policy makers to adequately address this issue, to ultimately refine the existing health care alternatives for them. This paper describes the Belgian development, face and content validation of the DDads (Depression in Dads) questionnaire. Its focus is to identify the awareness, knowledge and attitudes of the general population toward paternal perinatal depression.Study Design: The DDads was developed using a three-step model with the following phases: (1) identification of the content domain, (2) item generation and (3) construction of the questionnaire. For the DDads validation a (a) Delphi method with content experts (n = 17) and (b) a cognitive debriefing method with lay experts (n = 20) were used to assess the clarity, relevance, wording and layout.Results: The questionnaire consists of three main components comprising: (1) three questions on awareness, (2) three questions on knowledge and (3) one question on attitudes and beliefs. After round one validation, all questions were considered content valid for relevance (I-CVI 0.94–1.00), and six questions for clarity (I-CVI 0.65–1.00). Scale content (S-CVI/Ave 0.93) and face validity (Face Validity Index 1.00) was obtained. One question was revised and split into two questions in a second round. For one of these questions, item content (0.80–0.93), scale content (0.92) and face validity (1.00) was reached. The one question, exploring the causes of paternal perinatal depression, remained inappropriate and was removed from the DDads. One last question was removed after interviews with lay experts.Conclusions: We developed an instrument to establish awareness, knowledge and attitudes of the general population toward paternal perinatal depression in Belgium. The DDads can be valuable in identifying knowledge gaps. It can help to inform policy makers and health professionals to identify gaps and predisposed attitudes in society toward paternal depression which may hinder appropriate management.

Defining midwifery autonomy in Belgium: Consensus of a modified Delphi study

“…The content validity was quantitatively measured by establishing the proportion of experts agreeing on the clarity and relevance of the selected critical component. The selected methodology was adapted from Zamanzadeh et al (Zamanzadeh et al, 2014) and has also been used in earlier validation studies (Vermeulen et al, 2018; Vermeulen, Buyl, et al, 2020a).…”

A Psychometric Study of the Perinatal Assessment of Maternal Affectivity (PAMA) for the Screening of Perinatal Affective Disorders in Mothers

“…However, the most common and usual screening tools in this field are developed considering female over male signs and symptoms and not vice versa. Only in recent years have the growing concerns on paternal mental health during the perinatal period [ 4 ] pushed some researchers to develop different and specific screening and assessment tools for fathers, such as the Dads Questionnaire [ 30 ] and the Perinatal Assessment of Paternal Affectivity (PAPA) [ 23 ]. In a recent cross-sectional study with a 3 month test–retest involving 385 (T1) and a sub-sample of 111 (T2) fathers [ 23 ], respectively, the PAPA showed adequate internal consistency and test–retest reliability.…”