Psychometric properties, construct validity and invariance across sexes of the fear of COVID-19 scale in Brazilian high-school adolescents

The outbreak of COVID-19 precipitated not only a global public health emergency but also an unprecedented psychological crisis. Consequently, there has been a documented surge in negative psychiatric outcomes, with fear, depression and anxiety emerging as the most salient psychological responses to the pandemic. Regarding fear, valid instruments for assessing this feeling are scarce among Brazilian adolescents. To verify the psychometric properties and biological sex invariance of Brazilian version of Fear of COVID-19 Scale in a sample of Brazilian adolescents girls and boys. A total of 543 Brazilian adolescents were included in this study. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with a Diagonally Weighted Least Squares estimator was used to verify the psychometric properties of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale. To evaluate the concurrent and criterion validities Spearman’s correlations with the DASS-21 and social distancing index were stablished. The CFA supported the unidimensional structure and internal consistency (ω = 0.901) of the FCV-19s in our sample. Multigroup CFA showed that FCV-19s was fully invariant across biological sex. The factorial score of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale demonstrated significant positive correlations with depression ( r s = 0.236), anxiety ( r s = 0.296), and stress ( r s = 0.312) subscales and total DASS-21 scores ( r s = 0.302), thereby supporting its concurrent validity. Furthermore, preliminary construct validity based on associations with external variables was established through a significant positive association with the social distancing index ( r s = 0.208). The FCV-19s is a reliable psychometric instrument for assessing the fear of COVID-19 in Brazilian adolescents, within findings from the validity and reliability analyses indicating that the scale has a stable one-factor structure.