Abstract

Background The maternal attitude toward infant feeding is one of the strong predictors of the start and continuation of exclusive breastfeeding. According to the validity and reliability assessment of Iowa Infant Feeding Attitude Scale (IIFAS) in many countries, the purpose of this study was to examine psychometric properties of an Iranian version of this scale. Materials and Methods: The present study was a cross-sectional and performed on 280-breastfeeding mothers in the first 48 hours after delivery. After translation with forward-Backward technique, in order to assess the structure validity, the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted and the goodness of fit indices were calculated. Reliability of the tool was measured with the use of Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for the measurement of internal consistency and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) to assess the stability through test-retest method. Results: In the first phase of CFA, from 17 questions of the original version of the scale, six questions included 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, and 17 were removed due to the loading factor of less than 0.3. In the second phase of CFA, validity of the 11-question version with two-factor structure confirmed. The ratio of Chi- square to the degree of freedom was 2.44 that along with other goodness of fit indices of the model showed the two-factor model has excellent fit. The Cronbach's alpha and ICC were 0 .856 and 0 .885, respectively; that represented the good reliability of the scale. Conclusion Overall, the results showed that the 11-question version of (IIFAS) is a valid, reliable, acceptable and repeatable tool for measuring infant feeding attitude in Iranian mothers.