PSYCHOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE FEAR SCALE OF COVID-19 IN HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHERS
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Abstract
COVID-19 has impacted people's physical and mental health during the pandemic, so there was a need to assess the psychological effects of COVID-19. The FCV-19S scale is the most frequently used to measure the phenomenon of Fear of COVID-19 and is composed of 7 items on a 5-point Likert scale. Given this context, this study aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of the FCV-19S scale in its Portuguese version and, in particular, to characterize the level of Fear of COVID-19 for the population of higher education teachers in the city of João Pessoa-PB. The research is classified as quantitative and exploratory, with data collected online. A total of 279 teachers agreed to participate in the research and were included in the sample. The methodology used the Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach to assess the quality of the FCV-19S scale and subsequently groups of teachers were compared according to the public or private education network, through nonparametric Mann-Whitney tests. The results showed that the scale has excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.899) and the composite reliability is 0.883, higher than the requirement of 0.70. The unidimensional structure of the scale was confirmed and the global fit indices indicated a good fit of the proposed unidimensional model (NFI = 0.991; IFI = 0.997; RFI = 0.974; TLI = 0.990; GFI = 0.989; CFI = 0.997; RMSEA = 0.047; relative χ2 = 1.617). The factorial validity, convergent validity and discriminant validity criteria were met, so that the results indicate that the statistical validity and reliability of the FCV-19S scale presented excellent psychometric quality. Thus, the FCV-19S scale in Portuguese is suitable for measuring the Fear of COVID-19 phenomenon for the population of higher education teachers in João Pessoa - PB.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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