Validation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale in a sample of university students

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The fear of COVID-19 has spread worldwide, affecting all communities, including university students. It is required to have tools to measure this fear. Objective: To validate the translate Spanish version of the FCV-19S questionnaire (Fear of COVID-19 Scale). Methodology: A cross-sectional online-questionnaire-based study was conducted among Peruvian university students during the first outbreak by COVID-19. Undergraduate students with a native Spanish language, with internet access, were voluntarily included, and subjects with language comprehension problems were excluded. The translation of the questionnaire was carried out under a standardized protocol and an observational evaluation was applied to assess the validity and reliability of FCV-S19 with α-Cronbach, Pearson's correlation, and factor analysis. Results: Two-hundred eight university students with an average age of 25.9 ± 5.9 (IC95 % 25.1 a 26.7) years were surveyed, where more than half were women (58.7 %) and approximately 57 % lived with their parents. The Cronbach alpha was ≥ 0.8 among the domains, giving a good internal consistency of the questionnaire (Cronbach alpha = 0.832). The validity of the instrument between the 7 items and the 5 categories showed an adequate correlation (p< 0.5), the Bartlett (p= 0,0001) and the Kaiser-Meyer Olkin (0,818) tests defined by factor analysis a dimension that explained 52.3 % of the total variance. Conclusions: The translation into Spanish of the FCV-19S questionnaire has optimal validity and reliability, being able to measure fear of COVID-19 in a sample of university students from Peru. © 2022, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.