Motivation to have a Child Scale (MCS)

This scale aims to measure individuals’ motivation for becoming parents. The scale is an adaptation of the Motivation to have a Child Scale (MCS; Gauthier et al., 2007), which was developed to assess the quality of motivation to have a child. Although the original MCS was a promising measure to assess motives for parenthood, some of the correlations between the types of motivation were not fully in line with the simplex-like structure expected on the basis of SDT (Gauthier et al., 2007). Therefore, Brenning et al. (2015) made a couple of adaptations to further optimize the instrument. The resulting measure includes 20 items (see below) rated on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (do not agree at all) to 5 (strongly agree). Each item is presented with the introductory stem “An important reason for me to have a child is . . .” Depending on the research interests, the questionnaire can be administered before, during or after pregnancy, in both women and men.