Development and Validation of the Body Understanding Measure for Pregnancy Scale (BUMPs) and Its Role in Antenatal Attachment

Pregnancy is a unique period in a woman's life during which her body undergoes rapid and dramatic change. Many of these changes are in direct conflict to social ideals of female body appearance, such as increases in body size and weight. Existing research that has examined body satisfaction in pregnancy is limited by the use of measures that are not designed for pregnancy, yielding biased results. Two studies have attempted to develop measures for pregnancy but have used suboptimal sample sizes and/or have not fully validated the measure with independent samples. We seek to address these limitations in the current study and report the development and validation of the newly developed Body Understanding Measure for Pregnancy scale (BUMPs) in 613 pregnant women across two independent samples. Exploratory factor analysis revealed three factors; satisfaction with appearing pregnant, weight gain concerns, and physical burdens of pregnancy, which were confirmed with confirmatory factor analysis. Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) modeling indicated the scale is appropriate for women in all three trimesters of pregnancy. Evidence of internal reliability, test-retest reliability and convergent validity provide excellent psychometric support. We further demonstrated construct validity by supporting 3 hypotheses, finding that more positive body satisfaction in pregnancy was related to: (a) better relationship quality; (b) lower depression and anxiety; (c) higher levels of interoception, specifically body listening, and body trusting. Additionally, we present evidence that BUMPs score was the strongest predictor of antenatal attachment when compared against depression, anxiety. gestational age, and relationship satisfaction.