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Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences

Author ORCID Identifier

BURCU AYKANAT GİRGİN: 0000-0002-2601-8781

DUYGU GÖZEN: 0000-0001-9272-3561

SABİHA ÇAĞLAYAN: 0000-0003-4586-8930

BRİTT PADOS: 0000-0002-8016-2370

DOI

10.55730/1300-0144.5832

Abstract

Background/aim: Preterm infants often continue to have feeding difficulties after hospital discharge. Parental use of assessment tools and collaboration with health professionals are important for the early diagnosis of post-discharge feeding difficulties. This methodological study examined the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Neonatal Eating Assessment Tool (NeoEAT)–Bottle-feeding in post-discharge preterm infants in Turkey.Materials and methods: A Turkish version of the NeoEAT–Bottle-feeding was developed and applied to 321 mothers of preterm infants younger than seven months of corrected age between August 2021 and December 2022. Cronbach’s α, exploratory factor, confirmatory factor, item-total correlation, test-retest, and known-groups validity analyses were performed.Results: The Turkish NeoEAT–Bottle-feeding has 60 items in five factors explaining 55.785% of the total variance. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that item factor loading ranged from 0.320 to 0.792. Known-group analysis confirmed that preterm infants with diagnosed feeding problems had higher total and subscale scores than those without (p = 0.001). The Cronbach’s α of the entire scale was 0.96. Item-total correlation coefficients were between 0.31 and 0.77 (p = 0.001). There was excellent agreement between test values and retest values obtained after a two-week interval (intraclass correlation coefficients = 0.930-1.000).Conclusion: The Turkish NeoEAT–Bottle-feeding was shown to be a reliable and valid parent-reported assessment tool for oral feeding skills and difficulties after NICU discharge in bottle-fed preterm infants younger than seven months of corrected age. Healthcare professionals can use this assessment tool during the initial evaluation of risk factors contributing to problematic feeding and to determine the effectiveness of planned interventions in preterm infants.

Keywords

Bottle feeding, infant, patient-reported outcome measures, premature, psychometrics

First Page

631

Last Page

643

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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