Abstract:
Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) emerged in December 2019, causing significant changes in people’s social lives and other human
activities. The outbreak halted educational activities throughout the world. The Nigerian experience was unique in that most people
were skeptical about the pandemic’s existence. This practice contributed to the Nigerian people’s fear of the COVID-19 outbreak.
However, in Nigeria, there has never been a validated or established Covid-19 phobia scale, necessitating this study.
This study was a pure validation study on COVID-19 phobia scale (C19PS). The study area was south-east states and a sample of
386 preschool practitioners in urban and rural communities of South East States, Nigeria participated in the study. The eligibility
criteria include being a preschool teacher and demonstrating signs of COVID-19 phobia. The validation of the C19PS was done by
subjecting the data gathered to principal axis factoring analysis with varimax rotation. The model fit for the data was tested using
root mean square error of approximation and comparative fit index.
It was found that the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of .845 for the measure of the adequacy of the sample size. There was also a
significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity (P<.05). This implies that the correlation matrix for the C19PS is not an identity matrix. It was
revealed that C19PS had good overall reliability (a=.896) and model fit (Root mean square error of approximation=.042,
comparative fit index=.943) in a sample of Nigerian preschool practitioners.
As a result, C19PS was recommended as a trustworthy tool for identifying persons who suffer from COVID-19 phobia.
