Developing Germophobia Questionnaire: A Pilot Study on Psychometric Characteristics

The World Health Organization has recently identified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The outbreak of the disease has caused many people around the world to become extremely frightened and they show phobic signs. The purpose of the present study was to develop and normalize of Germophobia Questionnaire (GPQ).

The participants were 113 individuals (74-female) of the Iranian population. They completed the GPQ and Y-BOCS.

All ethical principles and privacy policies of the results informed the participants. This study was approved in the second session of the Psychological Committee of the Islamic Azad University of Tehran’s province in March 2020.

 The results illustrate that the GPQ has acceptable internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (a=0.67), reliability coefficients with split-half (0.72), and one-week test-retest (r=0.73); in addition, the GPQ demonstrate moderate convergent validity with contamination obsessions checklist of Y-BOCS (r=0.44) as a convergent coefficient; and finally, the exploratory factor analysis indicates three-factors of the GPQ. 

Based on these findings, the GPQ has acceptable and good psychometric properties; researchers can use the GPQ as a reliable and valid instrument for assessing the germophobia levels in epidemic and pandemic crises like COVID-19.