The evaluation of the psychometric properties of fear of disease coronaviruses scale (Covid2019)

The ongoing outbreak of the recently emerged novel coronavirus (Covid-2019), poses a challenge for public health and it has led to a fear of being at risk of acquiring Covid-2019. This study aimed to examine the the evaluation of the psychometric properties of fear of disease coronaviruses scale (FDCS). For this purpose, 200 people from all over Iran were selected by convenience sampling method and they responded to the fear of disease coronaviruses scale (FDCS), dark future scale (DFS) of Zaleski, Sobol-Kwapinska, Przepiorka & Meisner (2019) and thanatophobia scale (TS) of Veisi (2019). To assess the convergent validity of this scale and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to evaluate the reliability of the scale. Generally, the goodness of fit characteristics of the confirmatory factor analysis model indicated a good fit of the data with factor structure of the fear of disease coronaviruses scale (FDCS). Convergent validity of the scale with future anxiety correlation coefficient of 0.591 and with thanatophobia correlation coefficient of 0.585 was significant at 0.01 indicating convergent validity of this scale. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient 0.81 indicated the stability of the measurement of the scale. Based on these results, one can use the need for disease coronaviruses scale developed as an acceptable measurement tool to study fear of disease.