Psychometric Evaluation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale Among Chinese Population

Abstract

Fear is a negative emotional reaction to or persistent worry over an imminent public health event like COVID-19. The COVID-Fear Scale was developed in many countries, but not in China. The current study aims to examine the psychometric properties of Chinese version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale. Translation into Chinese and backtranslation into English were conducted firstly. Item analysis and exploratory factor analysis were conducted in Sample 1, followed by validity tests in Sample 2. Likely, test-retest reliability was conducted in sample 3. A bifactor structure of Chinese version of FCV-19S with a general fear factor and two orthogonal group factors with fear thoughts and physical response was confirmed. Besides, it has good internal consistency reliability (α = .92), composite reliability (CR = .92), and validity correlation validity. The results of the present study confirmed that the Chinese version of FCV-19S has good psychometric properties in the Chinese communities. Keywords Fear of COVID-19 Scale. Reliability. Validity Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel and highly infectious respiratory disease, which has threatened to become a global public health crisis (Cucinotta and Vanelli 2020). Specifically, the COVID-19 has affected 215 countries till July 13, 2020, and the number of confirmed cases has exceeded 12.95 million with 560,000 registered deaths worldwide (Worldometers 2020). In China, approximately 80,000 individuals have been diagnosed with COVID-19, with over 4600 officially recorded deaths (Chinese National Health Commission 2020). Such substantial negative effects or damage caused by COVID-19 are not simply observed on the global economy (Al-Awadhi et al. 2020; Laing 2020), but this pandemic is also affecting mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, and fear) across a variety of age groups and cultural backgrounds (Liu et al. 2020; Rajkumar 2020).

Predictors of Mental Health After the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poland

“…are convergent with the results of the study into the fear of COVID-19 [38]. It is worth adding that there are findings indicating higher levels of fear among young people [39]. Individuals with lower education and a generally lower social status experienced higher levels of stress, which may be explained by the fact that their sensitivity threshold for the loss of financial resources is stronger [31].…”

Investigating Links Between Fear of COVID-19, Neuroticism, Social Networks Use Disorder, and Smartphone Use Disorder Tendencies

“…All participants filled in a Chinese version of the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale [BSMAS; original by Andreassen et al ( 2012 ), slightly modified using the social media term (instead of “Facebook”) and translated into Chinese with back and forward translation by the present group]. Moreover, participants completed a short form of the smartphone addiction scale (SAS-SV; Chinese version as used in Elhai et al, 2020b ) and of the Fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S; Ahorsu et al, 2020 ; Chi et al, 2021 ). Of importance, the SAS-SV and BSMAS instructions specifically asked participants about digital problems since the start of the COVID-pandemic.…”

Experiencing fear during the pandemic: validation of the fear of COVID-19 scale in Polish

“…The Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) was originally developed for the general population in Iran to evaluate the emotional response to COVID-19 and it was published in the English version (Ahorsu et al, 2020b). Subsequently, this scale has been translated from English and validated in many languages, i.e., Arabic (Alyami et al, 2020), Bangla (Sakib et al, 2020), Brazilian Portuguese (Faro et al, 2020), English (Perz, Lang & Harrington, 2020;Winter et al, 2020), French (Mailliez, Griffiths & Carre, 2020), Italian (Soraci et al, 2020), Malay (Pang et al, 2020), Persian (Ahorsu et al, 2020b), Spanish (Barrios et al, 2020;Huarcaya-Victoria et al, 2020;Martínez-Lorca et al, 2020), Tamil (Bharatharaj et al, 2020), Turkish (Haktanir, Seki & Dilmaç, 2020;Satici et al, 2020), Urdu (Mahmood, Jafree & Qureshi, 2020), Chinese (Chi et al, 2021), Hebrew (Bitan et al, 2020), Japanese (Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020), Russian-Belarusian (Reznik et al, 2020), Romanian (Stănculescu, 2021), and Taiwanese (Chang et al, 2020). Previous scale validations covered many internally varied and different in size groups, e.g., 629 adolescents from two junior high schools in Japan (Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020), 1,700 participants aged 10-57 in China (Chi et al, 2021), or 693 members of the general Saudi population who were at least 18 years of age (Alyami et al, 2020).…”

“…The FCV-19S has been used in a number of published research on the relationships in terms of such important psychological issues as depression, anxiety and stress (Ahorsu et al, 2020b;Perz, Lang & Harrington, 2020;Bitan et al, 2020;Alyami et al, 2020), mental wellbeing (Ahmed et al, 2020;Winter et al, 2020), specific phobia(s) (Soraci et al, 2020), satisfaction with life (Satici et al, 2020), psychological distress (Alyami et al, 2020), post-traumatic stress disorder (Huarcaya-Victoria et al, 2020), generalized anxiety disorder (Tsipropoulou et al, 2020), resilience, self-compassion (Chi et al, 2021), perceived vulnerability to disease (Masuyama, Shinkawa & Kubo, 2020), preventive behavior during the pandemic (Ahorsu et al, 2020a), germ aversion, or even political beliefs (Winter et al, 2020).…”