Development and Validation of a Scale of Negative Attitudes Toward COVID-19 With a Sample of People With Chronic Conditions and Disabilities

Abstract

Health anxiety will increase as a result of COVID-19. Many people who feel vulnerable, including individuals with disabilities and chronic illnesses, may be more susceptible to stigmatize individuals who have an infection. Researchers in this study aimed to develop a measure of negative attitudes toward COVID-19 among people with disabilities and chronic illnesses to better understand how stigmatization, which can cause negative outcomes, plays a role in individuals with disabilities' response to COVID-19. The study was conducted with 269 participants with any disability or chronic illness in which all completed the online questionnaire. To examine the psychometric properties of the COVID-19 Negative Attitudes Scale (COVID-19 NAS), an exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, reliability analysis, and correlation were conducted. In addition, concurrent validity was assessed through correlations with participants' stress related to COVID-19, depression and anxiety, and resilience. Exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that COVID-19 NAS is a unidimensional scale. Confirmatory factor analysis results confirmed the one dimensionality of the scale. Our findings indicate that the COVID-19 NAS could be a valuable tool in assessing negative attitudes toward COVID-19 for people with chronic conditions and disabilities.

Service-Connected Disability and Happiness in Student Veterans: A Parallel Mediation Study of PERMA

“…In addition, rehabilitation counselors may find peer support specialists (Fortuna et al, 2019, 2021) who have knowledge and expertise on working with Veterans with disabilities given Veterans prefer working with their fellow Veterans. Finally, although these data were not collected during the pandemic, we strongly believe that this study provides us promise that improving positive emotions and sense of accomplishment may help student Veterans to buffer negative impact of COVID-19 on persons with disabilities and college students as reported by research (Ibarra-Mejia et al, 2022; Lee et al, 2021; McGuire et al, 2022; Umucu, 2021b; Umucu & Lee, 2020; Umucu, Lee & Bezyak, 2022; Umucu, Reyes, Urkmez, et al, 2022).…”

The Impact of COVID-19 on Persons With Disabilities: A Systematic Review of Literature

“…Several measures were utilized to measure the impact of COVID-19. Of the studies, 42.1% (n = 8) reported an authorcreated scale to assess or measure health behaviors (Bishop & Rumrill, 2021;Czeisler et al, 2021;Moss et al, 2020;Rosencrans et al, 2021), attitudes toward COVID-19 (e.g., COVID-19 Negative Attitudes Scale; Umucu, Reyes, et al, 2021), effects of COVID-19 on employment (Morrow et al, 2021), engagement in social media (Dobransky & Hargittai, 2021), quality of life (Okyere et al, 2021), and use of services (A. E. .…”