Impairment of Mother-Infant Relationship

The implementation of the Comprehensive Child Development Service in Hong Kong brought about the need for the development of an instrument for assessing mother-infant relationship impairments in women with postnatal depression. The Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire by Brockington et al. (2001) was first translated into Chinese, then back-translated into English. An expert panel was set up to evaluate the content validity and a focus group discussion was held to explore the face validity and acceptability of the questionnaire. The Chinese version of the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire (C-PBQ) was administered to 62 women suffering from postnatal depression. Scale 1 of the C-PBQ had a sensitivity of 84% for detecting women with any forms of mother-infant relationship impairments and scale 2 had a sensitivity of 89% for detecting rejection of infant and a sensitivity of 77% for detecting pathological anger towards infant. The C-PBQ is a useful instrument for detecting mother-infant relationship impairments as perceived by women with postnatal depression.