Adaptation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale: Its Association with Psychological Distress and Life Satisfaction in Turkey

Abstract

The world is currently experiencing a pandemic of an infectious disease called COVID-19 which has drawn global intensive attention. While global attention is largely focusing on the effects of the coronavirus on physical health, the impacts of the coronavirus on psychological health cannot be overlooked. Therefore, this study aims to adapt the Fear of COVID-19 Scale into Turkish and investigate the relationships between fear of COVID-19, psychological distress, and life satisfaction. Data were collected by convenience sampling method, which allowed us to reach total 1304 participants, aged between 18 and 64 years, from 75 cities in Turkey. In the adaptation process of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale, confirmatory factor analysis, Item Response Theory, convergent validity, and reliability (Cronbach's α, McDonald's ω, Guttmann's λ6, and composite reliability) analyses were performed. Additionally, the mediating role of psychological distress on the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and life satisfaction was tested. The unidimensionality of the 7-item scale was confirmed on a Turkish sample. Item Response Theory revealed that all items were coherent and fit with the model. The results indicated that the Turkish version of the scale had satisfactory reliability coefficients. The fear of COVID-19 was found to be associated with psychological distress and life satisfaction. Results indicated that the Turkish version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale had strong psychometric properties. This scale will allow mental health professionals to do research on the psychological impacts of COVID-19 in Turkey.

Fear of COVID-19, psychological distress, work satisfaction and turnover intention among front line nurses 

“…Although there is a lack of similar studies of the nursing population, this relationship is in accordance with previous studies involving the general population. For instance, in a study involving 1 304 Turkish individuals, increased levels of fear of COVID-19 were strongly linked to negative emotional states including anxiety, depression and stress (Satici et al,, 2020). A study by Bakioglu et al (2020) showed a similar pattern: fear of COVID-19 had a signi cant positive relationship with anxiety, depression and stress.…”

Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S)

“…Although the Turkish version also reports a single factor and has a good sample size, its authors directly carried out a con rmatory factor analysis, like others researchers did (Sakib et al, 2020;Satici et al, 2020;Tsipropoulou et al, 2020). This could explain why the Turkish version authors did not nd two factors, since they directly performed the con rmatory analysis of the original one-dimensional model (Ahorsu et al, 2020).…”

“…This sample included more participants than those involved in the English version scale (Ahorsu et al, 2020), as well as versions in Hebrew (Tzur Bitan et al, 2020), Italian (Soraci et al, 2020), Arabic (Alyami et al, 2020), Russian (Reznik et al, 2020) and Indian (Doshi et al, 2020). However, our sample was smaller than the validationsample for the Turkish version (Satici et al, 2020), the Greek version (Tsipropoulou et al, 2020) and the Bangla version (Sakib et al, 2020).…”

Fear of COVID-19 and Mental Health: The Role of Mindfulness in During Time of Crisis

“…The total score of the scale is obtained by summing the item scores of the respondents and higher scores on the scale demonstrate higher levels of COVID-19 fear. Turkish adaptation of the scale demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties of the scale (Satici et al, 2020).…”