A study on validity and reliability of COVID-19 anxiety scale

Abstract

This study is aimed to develop the anxiety scale toward novel corona virus in Turkish public. The online questionnaire surveyed 1075 individuals from the general population of 70 provinces of Turkey who completed the questionnaire via social networks from May 1 to June 15, 2020. Two different samples were used in this study. In first step, 415 data were collected in second step 649 data was obtained for confirmatory factor analysis. A series of exploratory factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from the first sample. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis, 9 items were removed from the scale consisting of 17 items. The final COVID-19 Anxiety Scale consisting of two factors, which are Overreaction and Overprotection- Hygiene, and eight items, have been found as capable to measure the anxiety towards COVID-19. The construct validity of the COVID-19 Anxiety Scale, revealed by exploratory factor analysis, was tested with the confirmatory factor analysis applied to the second sample data. Accordingly, it has been revealed that the two-factor construct of the COVID-19 Anxiety Scale ensures a perfectly model-data fit. Another validity study is the determination of measurement invariance in gender groups of the Covid-19 Anxiety Scale. The results show that metric invariance was provided. Thus, factor variances and structural relationships between groups are comparable. The convergent validity of the scale was examined through item loadings, composite reliability, and average variance extracted values. All of them provide critical values for convergent validity. Since the correlation between the factors was lower than the average variance extracted by the factors, the discriminate validity of the scale was also provided. The reliability of the scale was examined with Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability. Both reliability coefficients show that the COVID-19 Anxiety Scale is reliable at a good level.