key: cord-0812842-5fye0lgh
authors: Lin, Chung-Ying; Griffiths, Mark D.; Pakpour, Amir H.
title: Psychometric properties of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale: A response to de Medeiros et al. “Psychometric properties of the Brazilian version of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S)”
date: 2022-01-06
journal: Curr Psychol
DOI: 10.1007/s12144-021-02686-4
sha: 953be91e8cba2941fd00c7c5fecba26955d69063
doc_id: 812842
cord_uid: 5fye0lgh

nan

laypeople. However, we consider that removing scale items without informing or consulting the developers is poor scientific etiquette and may jeopardize the latent concept of fear of COVID-19 in the scale we co-developed (see: Ahorsu et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2021) . More specifically, we used rigorous methodology to develop the FCV-19S with full consideration of the fear concept (using 30 different validated 'fear' scales as a basis for developing the instrument). However, de Medeiros et al. (2021) did not inform and request opinions from us as the developers of FCV-19S before they developed a brief version of FCV-19S. We believe that they should have to made a formal request to us as the original developers of the instrument before independently removing items and shortening it. Personally, we feel this is somewhat disrespectful.

Second, based on the results reported by de Medeiros et al. (2021) , it is obvious that the seven-item FCV-19S (i.e., our original FCV-19S) does not perform any worse than the shortened four-item FCV-19S. More specifically, the factor loadings derived from exploratory factor analysis were between 0.73 and 0.88 for the original FCV-19S, and between 0.58 and 0.80 for the brief FCV-19S. The factor loadings derived from confirmatory factor analysis were between 0. FCV-19S (e.g., Huarcaya-Victoria et al., 2020; Lin et al., 2021; Martínez-Lorca et al., 2020) .

Third, the major benefit of using a brief instrument is to save time in a busy setting (Li et al., 2021) , especially when the participants have a condition that burdens them when completing the instrument (e.g., participants being very old). However, we believe that our seven-item FCV-19S with easy-to-understand item descriptions do not take too much time when any individual uses it. Indeed, it only takes a couple of minutes at most to complete the original sevenitem FCV-19S. Developing an even shorter version of the FCV-19S does not appear to have any significantly enhanced benefits by slightly reducing the time taken to complete the FCV-19S and provides less useful information overall. In conclusion, we strongly recommend that anyone, including academic researchers, healthcare practitioners, and treatment providers, should think twice before using the brief version of our scale.

Funding The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.

Data Availability Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Ethical Approval All the procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ono Academic College institutional research board and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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