Test-retest Reliability of the Fear COVID-19 Scale: A Pilot Study

ABSTRACT

several weeks, resulting in a decline in the economy and business in Indonesia, which has a significant impact on Public. This has resulted in psychological changes, especially fear, depression, anxiety, and tremendous stress on Indonesian society. The need to measure fear of COVID-19 is necessary so that appropriate interventions are carried out. The COVID-19 fear scale  has been developed by Ahorsu and colleagues (Ahorsu et al., 2020). The scale consists of 7 items that are easy and fast to use in measuring fear of COVID-19. This scale has been successfully developed and validated in several countries in various languages. Therefore, to assess the fear of facing COVID-19, we immediately translated the FCV-19S scale into Indonesian (FCV-19S-I) by validating the questionnaire.

Methods
This study was a cross-sectional sample; participants aged more than 18 years in Indonesia were recruited. This research will be registered to the ethics committee in Indonesia first. The research sample included at least 30 participants aging ³ 18 years. All participant is screened for inclusion criteria. The Inclusion Criteria in this study were participants who agreed to participate in this research, aged  18 years old, able to speak Indonesian, willing to participate after providing informed consent, possess the required demographic characteristics, willing to selfreport their demographics. The exclusion criteria in this study where participants do not have a psychiatric disease.
The instrument included a demographic recording, Fear of COVID-19 Scale , for the survey. The questionnaire will be conducted psychometric properties test. The questionnaire is already getting permission from the original author.
Demographic data include age, gender, education level, city, marital status, occupation, marital status, employment, Monthly income, religion.
The FCV-19S questionnaire is a scale used to measure a person's level of fear of COVID-19. (Ahorsu et al., 2020). This questionnaire consists of 7 items and scores between 1 and 5, from strongly disagree to agree, respectively strongly. The total score is by adding up all the item scores between 7 and 35. High scores indicate a great fear of COVID-19. This scale has solid psychometric properties, including high internal consistency with a Cronbach alpha value of 0.82.
Statistical analysis is carried out using SPSS version 23.0 to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, range, and frequency distribution describe the participants' demographic data (Mishra et al., 2019). Pearson product correlation will be used in this study. Our study uses SPSS version 23. The descriptive statistics used to analyze the characteristic demographic data in this study are frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, and response distribution of each item. Cronbach's alpha was also used to assess internal consistency, inter-item relationships, and total corrected items. a Cronbach's alpha value greater than 0.07 indicates acceptable reliability (DeVellis, 2016). The relationship between items and the total items shows the relationship between items if the value is between 0.30-0.70.  (Ahorsu et al., 2020), and the Indonesian version of the fear of COVID-19 are shown in Table 1. Table 2 shows the demographic characteristics. The dataset includes around 32 participants' complete responses. The mean age in this study was 37.22, with a standard deviation of 6.74. Most of participant in this study were female (75 %), Magister (11 %), Married (23 %), more than 4 million (11 %), employed (29 %), Muslim (31 %), East Java (23 %).

Results and Discussion
The mean and Standard deviation each item was 3.28 (1.19), 3.03 (1.06), 2.00 (0.95), 2.75 (0.98), 2.31 (1.06), 2.09 (1.06), 2.06 (1.13), respectively. The skewness value was between -0.59 and 0.86, and kurtosis was from -0.82 to 0.18. Based on Byrne and Campbell explained that normal distribution could be reached if the values of skewness and kurtosis were from -1.5 and 1.5 (Byrne & Campbell, 1999 Based on the table about participants' response distribution, most of the participants checked firmly disagreed with statements number three, item six, and item number seven. Table  5 showed the inter-item Pearson's correlation matrix ranged from 0.19 to 0.80 and corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.49 to 0.77, which means showed that the Indonesia version of FCV-19S has adequate internal consistency (Table 5).   Table 5 Inter-item Pearson's correlation matrix and corrected item-total correlations Our study uses a sample of adults in Indonesia; this study aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Indonesian version of FCV-19S to ensure it is a reliable and valid measure that can be used to assess the severity of COVID-19 fear among the adult population in Indonesia. The findings indicate that the Indonesian FCV-19S has a unidimensional structure and good internal consistency.  (Ahorsu et al., 2020). Different languages translated the questionnaire, and the result showed adequate validity and reliability, such as from Argentina (Caycho-Rodríguez et al., 2020), Arab (Alyami et al.), Israel (Bitan et al., 2020), Indian (Doshi et al., 2020), Turkish (Haktanir et al., 2020), Bangla , Spanish (Martínez-Lorca et al., 2020), Japan (Masuyama et al., 2020), US (Perz et al., 2020), and Malay (Pang et al., 2020). Our result is almost similar with to previous study that used the FCV-19S. the value of internal consistency in our study of the Indonesian version FCV-19S was 0.87, which is this result higher than the original study (α=0.82) (Ahorsu et al., 2020), and the same as with the Italian version (α= 0.87) (Soraci et al., 2020), Turkish version (α= 0.85) (Satici et al., 2020), Arab version (Al-Shannaq et al., 2021), Item numbers three, six, and seven showed lower mean values than other items; it is shown that participants tended to have strongly disagreed with three statements. The statement of Item three was, "My hands become clammy when I think about Corona." Item number six was "I cannot sleep because I'm worrying about getting Corona," and item number seven was "My heart races or palpitates when I think about getting Corona." These results are consistent with the previous study from the Italian population (Soraci et al., 2020), Bangladeshi , and Turkish populations (Satici et al., 2020). Statements number 3, 6, and statement number 7 have the same meaning because all three relate to somatic aspects related to sweaty hands, lack of sleep, and heart palpitations.
The other statement items from FCV-19S are item number 1 and item number 2. These two items have almost the same meaning, compared to other items, because item number 1 and number 2 are common questions related to the fear of covid-19, or even if thinking about COVID-19 is uncomfortable. This item is different from other items, which explain aspects related to the physical aspect of item number 3, item 6 and item number 7, item 4 related to loss of life, and item 5, which is being anxious when you see news about Covid-19.
Overall, our result showed good internal consistency with the value of Cronbach's alpha was 0.87. The future study should also evaluate the correlation between other variables, such as fear, anxiety, and depression. And also, the practice of health protocol is protective, for example, hand washing, keeping social distancing, and always using masks. Our study had some limitations because this study used a pilot study; that's why our participants were too limited. However, we will continue to recruit more participants in the following project research.

Conclusion
This study showed good internal consistency with the value of Cronbach's alpha was 0.87. The future study should also evaluate the correlation between other variables, such as fear, anxiety, and depression. And also, the practice of health protocol is protective, for example, hand washing, keeping social distancing, and always using masks. We hope this study could be applied to Indonesian populations to screen fear of Covid-19 during the pandemic.