Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic scenario has a psychological impact on individuals and society. A higher level of perceived risk concerning COVID-19 has been found when compared to other potential health threats. A misperception of risk in contrast with the real risk may lead people to develop disruptive cognitive, affective, or behavioral responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely, coronaphobia. Validated instruments are needed to evaluate such responses. This work aims to validate the COVID-19 Perceived Risk Scale (C19PRS) and the COVID-19 Phobia Scale (C19PS) in the Portuguese population. The two scales were translated from English to Portuguese using the back-translation technique. The cultural adaptation was framed in the context of establishing the validity and reliability of the instruments. In two studies, C19PRS and C19PS were validated for the adult Portuguese population (N = 1122; women = 725 (64.6%); mean age of 31.91 years old) through exploratory factorial analysis, followed by a confirmatory factorial analysis. Convergent validity was calculated by composite reliability (CR) and average variance extracted (AVE) values. Discriminant validity was assessed by square roots of the AVE values and their comparison with the C19PRS and C19PS dimensions’ cross-correlations. Both C19PRS and C19PS present a good adjustment model and solid reliability and validity and have significant correlations with fear of COVID-19 and COVID-19 anxiety scales.
Highlights
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses known to cause diseases ranging from the common colds to more serious diseases, such as Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) [1]
Several procedures have been carried out to determine whether the data are suitable for exploratory factor analysis (EFA): in the correlation matrix, items three and four presented several correlations below r = 0.30 with other items; so, according to Yong and Pearce [45], they should be removed, as they indicated a lack of patterned relationships
None of the correlations between items were above r = 0.90, suggesting a lack of multicollinearity; the determinant score was above the rule of thumb of 0.00001 (0.04), indicating an absence of multicollinearity
Summary
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses known to cause diseases ranging from the common colds to more serious diseases, such as Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) [1]. A new coronavirus outbreak started in Wuhan city, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019 and January 2020, and has spread widely across the world since . Evolved as a public health emergency due to its spread within most countries, and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 [2]. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected 219,189,790 individuals globally, with 4,544,789 deaths, as of 3 September 2021. In Portugal, the pandemic of COVID-19 has infected 1,042,322 infected individuals, with 17,766 mortalities [3].
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