The Pediatric Inventory for Parents measures the frequency and difficulty of parental disease-related stress. We describe the psychometric properties and evaluation of the Norwegian version for mothers of infants with CHD.

The Pediatric Inventory for Parents contains 42 items within four domains: (1) communication, (2) emotional functioning, (3) medical care, and (4) role function. Participants assessed the frequency and difficulty of disease-related stressful events over the previous seven days. Data were collected from 48 Norwegian-speaking mothers of infants with CHD one month after hospital discharge. The psychometric properties of the frequency subscale were explored using exploratory factor analysis, and the discriminant and concurrent validity of the total scale were examined.

Factor analysis revealed that some items had poor loadings in our sample of mothers of infants with CHD. Cronbach’s alpha in domains was between 0.69 and 0.90. The Pediatric Inventory for Parents discriminated between stress levels in CHD severity in both subscales and all domains (p-values 0.03 to 0.001). Difficulty of disease-related stress and symptoms of depression were moderately correlated (r = 0.56 to 0.63).

The domains on the frequency subscale were multidimensional, and some items had lack of relevance to the population studied. Despite this, the Pediatric Inventory for Parents differentiated between stress in different CHD severity groups and correlated moderately with symptoms of depression. We recommend developing an infant version of the instrument. If the original version is used in mixed populations, lack of relevance of some items to infants should be accounted for.