Adaptação e validação da Escala de Medo da COVID-19

Abstract

Este trabalho objetivou adaptar a Escala de Medo da COVID-19 (Fear of COVID-19 Scale) para português brasileiro, realizar a Análise Fatorial Confirmatória dessa escala, buscar evidências de sua validade a partir da relação com o estresse e, por fim, estabelecer normas para interpretação dos escores da escala. Participaram 1.000 adultos, de ambos os sexos, com idade média de 30,9 (DP = 12,06). Os resultados evidenciaram que a análise fatorial confirmatória demonstrou que todos os índices de ajuste foram satisfatórios, confirmando a unidimensionalidade da escala. A média na Escala de Medo da COVID-19 foi de 22,2 pontos (mínimo de 7 e máximo de 35 pontos), o que representou medo em nível moderado. A escala apresentou validade convergente com Escala de Estresse Percebido e propôs-se estratos de classificação da intensidade do medo na escala com base na normatização dos escores desse instrumento.

The fear of the COVID-19 Scale: validation in the Portuguese general population

“…The EFA revealed a one-factor structure accounting for 66% of total variance. This unidimensionality of the scale was also confirmed with samples in Turkey (Satici et al, 2020, N ¼ 1,304); Saudi Arabia (Alyami et al, 2020, N ¼ 693); Italy (Soraci et al, 2020, N ¼ 249); Israel (Bitan et al, 2020, N ¼ 639); Bangladesh (Sakib et al, 2020, N ¼ 8,550); Brazil (Faro et al, 2020, N ¼ 1,000); Vietnam (Nguyen et al, 2020, N ¼ 5,423), United States (Perz et al, 2020, N ¼ 237); Spain (Mart ınez-Lorca et al, 2020, N ¼ 606); New Zealand (Winter et al, 2020, N 1 ¼ 1,397 and N 2 ¼ 1,023); Malaysia (Pang et al, 2020, N ¼ 228), and Greece (Tsipropoulou et al, 2020, N ¼ 2,970). Studies as Reznik et al (2020) obtained a two-factor structure with a sample from Russia and Belarus (N ¼ 850), where the first factor (items 3, 6, and 7) reflected physiological responses to the COVID-19 and the second factor (items 1, 2, 4, and 5) represented emotional responses to the COVID-19.…”

“…Although the present study was not the first use of a Portuguese-language version of the COVID-19 Scale (Faro et al, 2020, applied it in Brazil), it is to our knowledge the first to apply a Portuguese-language version of FCV-19S in Portugal to a sample of the Portuguese population. Furthermore, there are differences between the Portuguese language spoken in both countries.…”

“…Fear is one of the feelings triggered by the threat associated with COVID-19 (Bakio glu et al, 2020), that presents individual variations, by the influence of intolerance to uncertainty, perceived vulnerability to the disease and propensity to anxiety . The increase or decrease in fear can compromise rational clear thinking and behavior (Faro et al, 2020;Mart ınez-Lorca et al, 2020;Van Bavel et al, 2020), including the degree of adherence to prophylactic measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic (Lee, 2020).…”

“…An appropriate psychometric instrument to measure individuals' fear of COVID-19 is essential to design interventions that can reduce adverse effects on mental health associated to this pandemic (Bitan et al, 2020), as well as to develop stress management skills to help cope with stress during COVID-19. The recognition of the importance of this construct and the psychometric characteristics and applicability of the brief and valid Fear of COVID-19 Scale (Ahorsu et al, 2020) developed in Iran encouraged the translation and validation of the scale in various countries including Turkey (Satici et al, 2020), Saudi Arabia (Alyami et al, 2020), Italy (Soraci et al, 2020), Russia and Belarus (Reznik et al, 2020), Israel (Bitan et al 2020), Bangladesh (Sakib et al, 2020), Brazil (Faro et al, 2020), Vietnam (Nguyen et al, 2020), United…”

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).…”