Development and testing of the Labor Support Scale.

Nurses use interventions and supportive strategies to help mothers throughout labor, yet little research examines intrapartum nurses' labor support techniques. The purpose of the study was to develop and test a self-report instrument, the Labor Support Scale (LSS), to describe the frequency with which nurses perform interventions and nurses' perceptions of the helpfulness of interventions. Steps for instrument development were item generation, content validity testing, piloting, refining, and administering the questionnaire in two studies (n = 307, n = 472). Internal consistency reliability was .90 and .92 for the frequency and helpfulness portions of the instrument (respectively). Exploratory factor analysis, known groups technique, content analysis, and discriminant analysis evaluated validity. In both phases, instrument psychometrics provided evidence of content, construct, and discriminant validity.