Introduction:

The fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19S) is used to screen for symptoms of anxiety and depression related to COVID-19 in the general population; it consists of seven questions with Likert-type answers (1-5). Our objective was to validate FCV-19S Spanish version in the Mexican general population.

Material and methods:

Analytical, cross-sectional design. Three-hundred and six subjects from the general population were included during 2020 after having signed informed consent. Barlett and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) sphericity tests were applied. Reliability was calculated with Cronbach’s alpha, and external validity, using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and Pearson’s correlation coefficient for retest.

Results:

The general population sample included 306 participants; 64.4% were women (n = 197), mean age was 32 years (18-68). We obtained a KMO = 0.848, internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha = 0.870 (95% CI: 0.848-0.891), a rho coefficient of 0.508 (p < 0.001) and external validity of 0.151 (p = 0.008). Confirmatory analysis showed: χ2 = 22.802 (df = 13) with CMIN-DF = 1.900 (p ≤ 0.001), GFI = 0.972, CFI = 0.901, RMSEA = 0.062 (90% CI: 0.019-0.100) and TLI = 0.827.

Conclusions:

According to our findings, the scale shows adequate psychometric properties: reliability, internal consistency, correlation of subsequent measurements and convergence validity, for initial screening of Mexican general population.