Psychometric development and evaluation of a COVID-19 social stigma scale in Indonesia

Abstract

Stigma remains a significant problem globally, creating barriers to services for individuals in need, regardless of access to services. The stigma of COVID-19 primarily happened because it is a new disease with several unknowns, and these unknowns generate fear. This study aimed to conduct a psychometric development and evaluate the Public COVID-19 Stigma Scale that follows the Indonesian community’s cultural background. This study used research and development design to measure the COVID-19 stigma through six steps that include seven dimensions and is culturally sensitive, starting from a literature review through to psychometric evaluation. This study was community based and was conducted in 26 regions in the Sumedang Regency. The research and development step ran from July 2021 to November 2022, with a total of 1,686 respondents. The results showed that the social stigma scale for COVID-19 consisted of 11 valid and reliable items that were separated into seven dimensions: social distancing (1 item), traditional prejudice (7 items), exclusionary sentiments (2 items), negative affect (2 items), treatment carryover (1 item), disclosure carryover (2 items), and perception of dangerousness (1 item). Further research needs to be conducted to examine the level of stigma and determine interventions to overcome the social stigma around COVID-19 in the community.

Adaption and validation of scales to measure COVID-19 stigma attitudes and perceptions.

“…Although there are multiple COVID-19 stigma scales present in the literature, most of the scales were developed/validated with Chinese or other Asian populations (Nair et al, 2022; Nochaiwong et al, 2021; Yuan et al, 2021), and we recognized the need for measures developed together with African American communities with high social vulnerability in the United States. In addition, there are only a few validated measures that capture general community COVID-19 stigma (Earnshaw et al, 2020; Juniarti et al, 2023; Nochaiwong et al, 2021), while most scales capture the experiences of those who had COVID-19 (Reinius et al, 2023) or of those who provide health services to COVID-19 patients (Al Houri et al, 2022; Mostafa et al, 2021). We aimed to develop measures that can be used in research and programs to understand disparities in uptake of COVID-19 testing and precautions and to examine associations of these measures with sociodemographic characteristics of people living in underserved urban and rural African American communities in Alabama.…”