الخصائص السيكومترية لمقياس الخوف من جائحة كورونا (COVID-19)‎ في المجتمع العربي

Abstract EN

The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has caused many psychological disorders and problems, like fear, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, and others.

The present study aimed to develop a COVID-19 fear scale and to verify its reliability and validity by applying it to a sample of people in Arab society.

The scale was applied to an online sample using Google Forms.

The sample comprised 538 participants and varied according to gender, 123 (22.9%) males and 415 (77.1%) females; their ages ranged from 13 to 80 years (M = 27.186, SD= 9.816).

The participants also varied according to nationalities, 442 (82.2%) Egyptians and 96 (17.8%) from other Arab nationalities (61 Palestinians, and 35 from remaining Arab nationalities).

The data was analyzed using two softwares, SPSS and LISREL.

Results showed that the 12 items of the scale had a good degree of internal consistency using the Alpha Cronbach: (a=0.892) for the total sample, (a=0.870) for the Egyptian sample, (a=0.855) for the Palestinian sample, and (a=0.890) for remaining Arab nationalities.

The exploratory factor analysisproduced two factors; one comprised five items representing personal fear (a=0.815) and the other factor comprised seven items representing behaviors related to fear of the Coronavirus pandemic (a=0.894) .

The confirmatory factor analysis of the two-factor model showed showed a satisfactory goodness of fit with the data, where the goodness of fit indices were as follows: p=.001, NFI=.96, NNFI=.95, CFI=.96, RMSEA=.076, (X2=302.2).

Therefore, and in the light of the good psychometric properties, the scale can be used to measure the fear of COVID-19 in particular, and the fear of pandemics in general.