The Polish Adaptation and Further Validation of the Covid Stress Scales (Css)

Abstract

"The scientific need to recognize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human psychosocial functioning requires reliable and valid research tools to assess this impact. Therefore, we designed a study to create and further validate a Polish version of a research instrument assessing stress, anxiety, and fear related to the pandemic – the COVID Stress Scales (CSS; Taylor et al., 2020). This paper presents the specific research steps designed to develop and validate the Polish-language version of CSS (Taylor et al., 2020). These steps are as follows: 1) the translation of the original CSS into the Polish language by three independent translators and the back-translation by three other independent translators; 2) the assessment of the equivalence of the Polish translation of CSS in a study involving a sample of 30-60 bilingual people, fluent both in English and Polish languages; 3) the pilot study employing the pre-final Polish version of CSS; 4) the validation study involving a sample 600-900 participants in which the following instruments will be used: the Fear of COVID-19 Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 Scale, the Short Health Anxiety Inventory, the Social Desirability Scale, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised Scale, the Xenophobia subscale of the Questionnaire of Political Beliefs and the subscale Sensation seeking from the Impulsive Behavior Scale. We expect that the Polish version of CSS will be widely used by Polish researchers in their studies concerning the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other epidemiological threats on mental health. At the same time, we hope that our study will provide results that will help foreign researchers understand the COVID-19 pandemic in other countries."