ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 peritraumatic distress index (CPDI) self-report questionnaire was designed to measure peritraumatic psychological distress in a pandemic emergency. AIM: The aim of the study was the validation of Bulgarian COVID-19 peritraumatic distress index (CPDI) questionnaire and its application to measure psychological distress level in Bulgarian population. METHOD(S): The study was conducted among 42 adults from February 2022 to March 2022. The average age of respondents participating in the validation of COVID-19 peritraumatic distress index (CPDI) questionnaire is 40.88 +/- 13.309, women being predominant-71.4% (n = 30), as well as individuals with higher education-69% (n = 29). Following the preliminary instruction, all participants filled out the online Bulgarian version of the questionnaire anonymously 2 times within a period of 2 weeks. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistic, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Cronbach's alpha, and Corrected Item-Total Correlation. RESULT(S): The CPDI instrument was linguistically validated according to a standard procedure (8) and cross-culturally adapted (9) into Bulgarian in several stages. The overall Cronbach's alpha for the Peritraumatic Distress Index (CPDI) questionnaire is 0.940. Almost all corrected item-total correlations exceeded the accepted cut off of 0.30 indicating each item was related to the overall scale except for Q5 "I feel sympathetic to COVID-19 patients and their families." CONCLUSION(S): The Bulgarian version of the questionnaire reveals good reliability and cross-cultural validity and can be applied widely for measuring the prevalence of psychological suffering and distress in the pandemic emergency. Copyright © 2022 Rumyana Stoyanova, Anna Mihaylova, Petya Kasnakova, Desislava Bakova, Stanislava Harizanova, Zlatina Zheleva, Tanya Deneva, Delyana Davcheva, Elka Toseva.