Indian Journal of Public Health Research & Development

Physical activity is very important during pregnancy for better maternal and foetal health. The physical activity during pregnancy varies with different periods of gestation. Therefore, the pregnancy physical activity is quite difficult to assess. The pregnancy physical activity questionnaire developed by Prof. Lisa Chasan Taber et al. (2004) is one of the few currently available questionnaires for measuring the physical activity during pregnancy. It was found to have few activities like mowing the lawn with mower which were not practiced in Tamil population thus there was a need to translate and culturally adapt the questionnaire.

Total 75 mothers were screened and finally 50 participants were selected according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. First session the mothers were administered with Tamil PPAQ and they were asked to fill details about past 7 days. The same was repeated after 1 week with English questionnaire for validation. In the last session, the mothers were administered with Tamil PPAQ for reliability analysis.

Internal consistency analysis of the Tamil PPAQ using Cronbach's alpha between the two Tamil PPAQ is good with the value 0.83. The test retest reliability was done between the Tamil PPAQ and English PPAQ by Intraclass correlation coefficient which ranged from good to excellent (0.81–0.95).

The Tamil PPAQ is a valid and reliable tool. It has good accuracy for the measurement of physical activity of various intensities and types among pregnant women.