Construction of the Views oN Infant Sleep (VNIS) Questionnaire

Abstract

Parents' beliefs about infant sleep behaviour vary over time and across cultures. No validated instrument exists to understand parents' pre- and postnatal views on infant sleep behaviours, which may influence their caregiving decisions. The Views oN Infant Sleep Questionnaire (VNIS) will be a tool to assess parents' beliefs in order to facilitate tailored perinatal care, increase the reliability of postnatal self-report measures, allow for cross-cultural comparisons, and provide a baseline for researchers to use in longitudinal studies. We recruited an online sample of 971 female participants who were resident in the United Kingdom, at least 28 weeks pregnant, and at least 18 years of age. The initial questionnaire consisted of 31 questions about infant independence, night-waking, infant feeding, touch, and safety, and items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The item pool was reduced to 12 using principal component analysis and a structure was found for the three components “Closeness”, “Independence”, and “Night-waking”. Overall, these results suggest that the VNIS can provide a brief scale to measure different aspects of individuals' beliefs about infant sleep. In further research the VNIS needs to be validated with a confirmatory factor analysis in another sample, and to be tested as a cross-cultural instrument.