Validation and Psychometric Evaluation of the Italian Version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale

Abstract

Background The advent of COVID-19 worldwide has led to consequences for people's health, both physical and psychological, such as fear and anxiety.Methods The sample comprised 250 Italian participants who were administered Italian versions of the FCV-19S, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), and the Severity Measure for Specific Phobia-Adult (SMSP-A). Several psychometric tests were performed to investigate the validity and reliability of the test including confirmatory factor analysis. Results Analysis of the data showed satisfactory psychometric characteristics and confirmed the scale's unidimensional properties. The seven FCV-19S items had acceptable correlations with the test total (from .443 to .784). Furthermore, the loadings on the factor were significant and strong (from .684 to .897). The internal consistency was very good (α = .871). Construct validity for the FCV-19S was supported by significant and positive correlations with the HADS (r=.649) and SMSP-A (r=.703).

Psychometric Validation of the Bangla Fear of COVID-19 Scale: Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Rasch Analysis

“…The present study was similar to the results obtained from the previous Iranian and Italian validation studies (Ahorsu et al 2020;Soraci et al 2020); both of which included depression scales to test for concurrent and criterion validity. All three validation studies reported significant positive associations between depression and FCV-19S score.…”

“…In general, the results of the study were comparable with the original Iranian validation (Ahorsu et al 2020) and a recent Italian validation study (Soraci et al 2020). However, factor loadings of the Bangla version of the FCV-19S were greater than those of both Iranian and Italian versions.…”

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

“…Similarly, for the Italian version (Soraci et al, 2020), authors also stated the importance of carrying out more research with a larger sample size to con rm the structure of the scale, since they report that they found covariance between items 1 and 5, which in our sample remains at factor 1. This difference found is not a contrary to what has already been published, but, in our study, it was possible to carry out an exploratory analysis rst and then a con rmatory analysis, both with quite optimal sample sizes compared to the publications mentioned above.…”

“…This research reports on the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the FCV-19S, testing a sample of 1077 people. 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).…”

Validation of the French Version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale and its Associations with Depression, Anxiety and Differential Emotions

“…As in a previous validation study (Soraci et al, 2020), although we did not include formal diagnoses concerning disorders (e.g., generalized anxiety disorders, depression), the French FCV-19S total score was positively correlated with anxiety and depression. This is in line with previous studies highlighting that long period of infectious pandemic can affect individuals' mental health (Duncan et al2009;Pappas et al2009).…”