The Fear of COVID-19 Scale: Development and Initial Validation

By D. K. Ahorsu, Chung-Ying Lin, V. Imani, M. Saffari, Mark D. Griffiths, Amir H. Pakpour. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 2020

3,909 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The emergence of the COVID-19 and its consequences has led to fears, worries, and anxiety among individuals worldwide. The present study developed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) to complement the clinical efforts in preventing the spread and treating of COVID-19 cases. Methods The sample comprised 717 Iranian participants. The items of the FCV-19S were constructed based on extensive review of existing scales on fears, expert evaluations, and participant interviews. Several psychometric tests were conducted to ascertain its reliability and validity properties. Results After panel review and corrected item-total correlation testing, seven items with acceptable corrected item-total correlation (0.47 to 0.56) were retained and further confirmed by significant and strong factor loadings (0.66 to 0.74). Also, other properties evaluated using both classical test theory and Rasch model were satisfactory on the seven-item scale. More specifically, reliability values such as internal consistency ( α = .82) and test–retest reliability (ICC = .72) were acceptable. Concurrent validity was supported by the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (with depression, r = 0.425 and anxiety, r = 0.511) and the Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Scale (with perceived infectability, r = 0.483 and germ aversion, r = 0.459). Conclusion The Fear of COVID-19 Scale, a seven-item scale, has robust psychometric properties. It is reliable and valid in assessing fear of COVID-19 among the general population and will also be useful in allaying COVID-19 fears among individuals.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Infectious Diseases, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80b50610ed02f9c7633414c504c818d95a2ccce0

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Citations in the corpus

Development and initial validation of the COVID Stress Scales (2020, neutral): “To date, there has been little empirical attention devoted to this issue; indeed, while several measures of COVID-19-related fears have recently emerged (e.g., Ahorsu et al., 2020) , they tend to be unidimensional (i.e., focused on general fear aspects of and are based on limited psychometric evalua”
Too afraid to Travel? Development of a Pandemic (COVID-19) Anxiety Travel Scale (PATS) (2021, methodology): “, 2017), as well as pandemic-related anxiety scales (Ahorsu et al., 2020; Lee, 2020; Lee et al., 2020), to identify relevant item candidates for our study.”
First COVID-19 suicide case in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: Possible suicide prevention strategies (2020, background): “Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID- 19.”
Adaptation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale: Its Association with Psychological Distress and Life Satisfaction in Turkey (2020, background): “Based on guidelines proposed by Baker (2001), an α value > 1.0 is considered highly discriminant.”
Social media influence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “…the epidemic’s psychological impact as moderate or severe; even a research group created and validated a scale called “Fear of COVID-19 sca-le” (14) to assess the level of stress and anxiety in the population and to establish appropriate measures to prevent sequels associated, such as…”
Validation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale in a US College Sample (2020, methodology): “The FCV-19S (Ahorsu et al. 2020) is a seven-item scale assessing anxiety regarding COVID-19.”
Fear of COVID-19 and Positivity: Mediating Role of Intolerance of Uncertainty, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress (2020, methodology): “The Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) The scale was developed by Ahorsu et al. (2020) and adapted to the Turkish context within the scope of this study.”
Measuring COVID-19 as Traumatic Stress: Initial Psychometrics and Validation (2020, background): “There is an initial attempt to develop a scale for one of these dimensions: the fear of COVID19 in Iran (Ahorsu et al., 2020).”
Fear of COVID‐19, psychological distress, work satisfaction and turnover intention among frontline nurses (2020, methodology): “existing protocol related to COVID19 ‡ Yes 2.824 0.883 -1.809 0.072 No 3.312 0.629 Age † 0.065 0.298”
What Have We Learned about the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer Behavior? (2021, background): “Many researchers consider that the fear of potentially being infected with COVID-19 is another component affecting consumer behavior when shopping in supermarkets [66,67].”
Exploring the associations between resilience, dispositional hope, preventive behaviours, subjective well-being, and psychological health among adults during early stage of COVID-19 (2020, background): “…problems such as depression, anxiety, and stress (Burke & Arslan, 2020; Kang et al., 2020; Xiang et al., 2020; Yildirim, Ozaslan & Arslan, 2020), fear (Ahorsu et al., 2020; Yıldırım, Geçer & Akgül, 2020), death distress (Yıldırım & Güler, 2020a), burnout (Yıldırım & Solmaz, 2020), and PTSD and…”