Arabic language version of the obsession with COVID-19 scale adaptation and validity evaluation in Saudi sample

BACKGROUND: The obsession with COVID-19 scale is a reliable and validated scale developed to assess obsessions related to coronavirus infection (COVID-2019) and because of its usefulness, this paper is aiming to develop an Arabic version of the obsession with COVID-19 scale and evaluate its validity. Firstly, scale translated to Arabic through the guidelines of Sousa and Rojjanasriratw for scale translation and adaptation. Then we distributed the final version with some sociodemographic questions and an Arabic version of the COVID-19 fear scale to a convenient sample of college students. Internal consistency, factor analysis, average variable extraction, composite reliability, Pearson correlation, and mean differences has been measured. RESULTS: Out of 253 students, 233 responded to the survey, where 44.6% of them were female. Calculated Cronbach’s alpha was 0.82, item-total correlations were 0.891–0.905, and inter-item correlations were 0.722–0.805. Factor analysis identified one factor which reflects 80.76% of the cumulative variances. The average variance extracted was 0.80, and the composite reliability was 0.95. The correlation coefficient between the two scales was 0.472. CONCLUSIONS: The Arabic version of obsession with COVID-19 scale has high values of internal consistency, and convergent validity, and has a unidimensional factor that reflects its reliability and validity.