Body Image Assessment Tools in Pregnant Women: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Pregnancy is a remarkable time and generates several changes in women in a short period. Body image is understood as the mental representation of the body itself, and, although bodily changes are considered healthy, they can impact pregnant women's body image. Problems related to body image during pregnancy can affect the health of the mother and fetus; thus, it is essential for health professionals to detect potential disorders as soon as possible. The objective of this systematic review was to identify instruments for assessing body image in pregnant women, highlighting their main characteristics. To this end, we applied the recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses to searches in the EMBASE, PubMed, and American Psychological Association databases from 5 January to 10 August 2021. We included studies on adult pregnant women without comorbidities in the validation and adaptation of (sub)scales that analyze components of body image. We excluded studies that considered nonpregnant, adolescent, postpartum, and/or clinical populations, as well as smoking/drug use studies that were not validation studies or did not assess any aspect of body image. We investigated the quality of the studies using the Quality Assessment Tool for Studies with Diverse Designs. In all, we examined 13 studies. The results point to a growing concern over body image during pregnancy, as there has been an increase in the number of validation and adaptation studies involving scales for different cultures that scrutinize different constructs. The findings suggest that the listed instruments be used in future research.

Keywords: body image; pregnancy; psychometrics; validation studies.

Figure 1

Selection flow diagram of the included studies.