A Demedicalized View of Maternal Distress: Conceptualization and Instrument Development

The goal of this article was to describe instrument development of a demedicalized, multidomain view of maternal distress, with psychological, relational, and situational manifestations. We developed a pilot instrument derived from our previous grounded theory conceptualization of maternal distress and administered it to a purposive sample of 100 low-income single mothers. Analyses testing the relationship between maternal distress and depressive symptoms, guilt, child rearing stress, and community needs variables suggested that the maternal distress inventory had convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity. Not only was maternal distress distinct from depressive symptomology and generalized child rearing stress, it appeared to be more meaningfully associated with "real world" outcomes of interest to psychological service providers than purely psychological measures of the distress.