Validation of Fear of COVID-19 Scale in India: Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory Approach

Abstract

COVID-19 has become one of the significant sources of stress, fear, and anxiety throughout the world. Though the global effect on the psychological health of university settings is still unclear, the effect is highly significant (Lima et al., 2020). Therefore, assessing students’ anxiety regarding this pandemic is the need of the hour. The Fear of COVID-19 scale developed by Ahorsu et al. (2020) is a unidimensional scale with seven items that assess the intensity of fear of COVID-19. Given the rapid increase of COVID-19 cases and fear of uncertainty among college students in India, we aim to analyze the psychometric properties and validate this scale in the Indian context. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among college students (n= 572). In confirmatory factor analysis, the loadings ranged between.54 and.78. To further validate this, we have performed item response theory analysis. The unidimensional IRT estimates shown in Table 5 reveals that item difficulties ranged between −.33 and 1.28. The item characteristics curve for the COVID-19 scale is given at the end of the results section.