Cross-language Validation of COVID-19 Compliance Scale in 28 Languages

Abstract

Objective: Although compliance scales have been used to assess compliance with health guidelines to reduce the spread of COVID-19, no scale known to us has shown content validity regarding global guidelines and reliability across a large international sample. Here, we have assessed the validity and reliability of the Compliance Scale developed by the COVIDiSTRESS II Global Consortium, a group of over 150 researchers from across the globe. Methods: We used exploratory factor analysis to determine the most reliable items on the English version of the survey. We conducted a measurement invariance test to determine whether the different language versions of the scale are measuring the same construct with the same measurement structure. Invariance testing indicated that measurement alignment was needed to ensure that the scales are comparable across languages and cultures. After alignment, we employed a novel R code to run MC simulation for alignment validation. Results: We found that alignment of the 6-item Compliance Scale worked well with this method. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed reliability of the six-item scale. Convergent validity was also found; COVID-19 compliance correlated with vaccine willingness. Conclusions: The Compliance Scale can be employed quickly across multiple languages and countries, and our alignment validation method can be conducted freely in R and employed for future cross-language surveys.

Predictors of compliance with COVID-19 guidelines across countries: the role of social norms, moral values, trust, stress, and demographic factors

“…The items were adapted from previous scales (Lieberoth et al, 2021;Van Bavel et al, 2022;Yamada et al, 2021) and relevant guidelines for reducing the spread of COVID-19 (WHO, 2022). The validation study on the COVIDiSTRESS II dataset demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency, and factorial and convergent validity (Blackburn et al, 2023).…”

“…Compliance Scale (CS). Compliance with guidelines to reduce the spread of COVID-19 was measured with a six-item scale developed and validated by Blackburn, Han and Gallegos (2023; see Supplementary Materials for the full scale). It consists of 6 items (e.g., "I stayed away from crowded places generally") rated on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).…”

“…Additionally, we focused on compliance as measured by the Compliance Scale, which incorporates different aspects of compliance. While it was beyond the scope of this paper to explore each aspect of compliance independently, this scale has been validated across languages (Blackburn et al, 2023) and we have further delved into different aspects of compliance as measured by this scale in other work (Garcia et al, 2022). Finally, we could not consider country-level factors that might predict compliance, such as the Human Development Index and per capita gross domestic product, since they were out of the scope of this paper as we focused on psychological predictors.…”

Human resources challenges in global health organizations: Managing a diverse and dispersed workforce

“…This understanding is crucial for ensuring compliance across borders. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of compliance on a global scale, as evidenced by the cross-language validation of a compliance scale in 28 languages (Blackburn et al, 2022). Furthermore, the challenges and opportunities in ensuring trustworthy artificial intelligence and process mining underscore the complexities of legal compliance in a global context (Pery et al, 2021;Kareem et al, 2022) shed light on the factors driving Africa's inability to comply with EU standards, emphasizing the importance of understanding institution and trade facilitation measures (Kareem et al, 2022).…”