Abstract
The ravages caused by the disease known as COVID-19 has led to a worldwide healthcare and social emergency requiring an effective combined effort from everyone to reduce contagion. Under these circumstances, the perception of the disease is going to have a relevant role in the individual’s psychological adjustment. However, at the present time there is no validated instrument for evaluating adult perception of threat from COVID-19. Considering the importance of perception or representation of the disease in a state of social alert, our study intended to validate an instrument measuring the psychological process of the disease caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19). In view of the above, this study evaluated the factor structure and reliability of the version of the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ) for COVID-19 in a sample of adults. The sample consisted of 1014 Spanish adults (67.2% women and 32.8% men). The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a unidimensional model of the scale, which was the one that showed the best fit and explained 43.87% of the variance. This brief version has adequate psychometric properties and may be used to evaluate the perception of threat from COVID-19 in an adult Spanish population. The validation of this instrument contributes to progress in representation of COVID-19 in our culture.
Highlights
The current outbreak of COVID-19 caused by a new coronavirus known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1] was located for the first time in Wuhan (China) in December 2019
The data showed that the distribution of the items on the BIP-Q5 were within the limits of normality according to the Finney y DiStefano [38] criterion, in which 2 and 7 are the maximum permissible values for skewness and kurtosis, with maximums in our case of 2.1 and 3.8, respectively
In the exploratory factor analysis, principal components extraction was used with direct Oblimin rotation (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin; KMO = 0.71) which enabled correlation between factors
Summary
The current outbreak of COVID-19 caused by a new coronavirus known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1] was located for the first time in Wuhan (China) in December 2019. There is a strong probability that the coronavirus that causes this disease, known as SARS-CoV-2, has a zoonotic origin. At the time of writing, March 2020, the high number of cases and the many countries affected define COVID-19 as a global pandemic such that on April 19, 2020 [5] figures related to COVID-19 had surpassed 2,281,714 confirmed cases and over 159,511 deaths associated with COVID-19 on five continents. These data show how highly infectious the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is around the world. Neither should it be forgotten that the search for an effective treatment, which is not yet available, requires coordination without precedent of healthcare professionals and the scientific community [8]
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