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.

The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) has recently been identified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The outbreak of the disease has caused numerous individuals around the world to become extremely frightened and subsequently present the signs of phobia. Fear is the basic emotion of anxiety disorders and individuals cope with their emotions by different strategies. The present study aimed at developing and validating Emotion Regulation Strategies for Germophobia Questionnaire (ERS-GPQ).

The study participants were 99 individuals (74 females) of the Iranian population with concerns about germs who were selected with the snowball sampling method. They completed the ERS-GPQ and GPQ in the Google Forms platform.

The present study results illustrated that the ERS-GPQ has acceptable internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (a=0.61), reliability coefficients with split-half (0.70), and one-week test-retest (0.92); the ERS-GPQ also presented a moderate positive correlation with the contamination obsessions checklist of GPQ (r=0.44) as the convergent coefficient. Besides, the confirmatory factor analysis indicated 2 factors of the ERS-GPQ. Finally, the ERS-GPQ has 2 components with good convergent and discriminate validities and composite reliability.

Based on the current research findings, the ERS-GPQ has acceptable and good psychometric properties; researchers can use the ERS-GPQ as a reliable and valid instrument for assessing ER strategies concerning germophobia. Furthermore, it has some considerations for practitioners in epidemic and pandemic crises, like COVID-19.