Abstract
This study examined the psychometric properties of a Brazilian adapted version of the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS-BR) in a sample of adults in Brazil. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the CAS-BR produces a reliable (α = .84), unidimensional construct whose structure was shown to be invariant across gender, race, and age. However, some items of the CAS-BR were stronger indicators of the coronavirus anxiety construct for women and younger adults. Although the CAS-BR demonstrated evidence of discrimination ability for functional impairment (AUC = .77), Youden indexes were low to identify a clinical cut-score. Construct validity was demonstrated with correlations between CAS-BR scores and measures of functional impairment, generalized anxiety, and depression. Exploratory analyses revealed that CAS-BR total scores were higher among women and participants with a history of anxiety disorder. These findings are consistent with previous investigations and support the validity of CAS-BR for measuring coronavirus anxiety with Brazilian adults.
Highlights
A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to test whether or not the items for this adapted version of the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS) (Lee, 2020) cohered together into a single, coronavirus anxiety construct using a sample of adults from Brazil
The results showed that the singlefactor model was internally consistent (a 1⁄4 .84) and yielded acceptable model fit [v2(5) 1⁄4 42.89, p < .001] for all of the indices [comparative fit index (CFI) 1⁄4 .96; Tucker Lewis index (TLI) 1⁄4 .92; SRMR 1⁄4 .02], except one [root-mean-square-error of approximation (RMSEA) 1⁄4 .12, 90% CI (.09, .16)]
The results revealed that coronavirus anxiety was higher among women (M 1⁄4 3.28; SD 1⁄4 3.59) compared to the non-women (M 1⁄4 1.71; SD 1⁄4 2.47), t(501.78) 1⁄4 5.81, p < .001, participants with a history of anxiety disorder (M 1⁄4 3.98; SD 1⁄4 4.06) compared to participants without a history of anxiety disorder (M 1⁄4 2.00; SD 1⁄4 2.59), t(234.61) 1⁄4 5.75, p < .001, as well as, participants very dissatisfied or dissatisfied with Government’s responses to COVID-19 (M 1⁄4 2.87; SD 1⁄4 3.36) compared to participants that were indifferent, satisfied or very satisfied with Brazilian Government (M 1⁄4 1.55; SD 1⁄4 2.61), t(503) 1⁄4 3.37, p
Summary
Adapted versions of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7; Spitzer et al, 2006) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9; Kroenke et al, 2001) were used to measure clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety and depression, respectively. The PHQ-9 demonstrated validity (de Lima Osorio et al, 2009; Santos et al, 2013) and adequate reliability (Bergerot et al, 2014) in studies conducted in Brazil. In this study, both adapted versions of the GAD-7 (a 1⁄4 .93) and PHQ-9 (a 1⁄4 .92) exhibited excellent levels of internal consistency reliability
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