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1 Department of Commerce, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India
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The unprecedented novel coronavirus crisis is innately stressful and raises concerns for fear and low resilience. Amid lockdown, students witnessed a difficult time surviving fear by staying away from their campuses, friends and coping up. As the fear of COVID-19 pandemic was exclusive, it needed to be treated in a similar way. Earlier studies capturing fear pertaining to past epidemics resorted to different measures, but the unique nature of coronavirus demanded a pertinent instrument to measure it. Thus, Ahorsu et al. (2022, Mental Health and Addiction, 20, 1537–1545) developed a unidimensional brief scale to measure COVID-19 fear responses in the Iranian context. The psychometric properties of the scale have been reported in several other cultural context, but not yet in India. The present study aims to check the validity and reliability of the FCV-19 scale developed by Ahorsu et al. (2022) in the Indian context. The sample comprises 264 university students. The results of the Cronbach’s alpha test demonstrate a good internal consistency of the scale in the Indian context. Further, the discriminant validity of FCV-19S was well supported. A confirmatory factor analysis was also run that shows a moderate fit confirming its univariate structure. Therefore, the findings suggest psychometric robustness of FCV-19S among the Indian population.
COVID-19 fear, psychometric evaluation, student in India, reliability test, resilience
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