Validation and Psychometric Evaluation of the COVID-19 Risk Perception Scale (CoRP): a New Brief Scale to Measure Individuals’ Risk Perception

Abstract

The aim of the work was to develop and validate the COVID-19 Risk Perception Scale (CoRP), a brief self-report questionnaire for individuals’ perceptions of risk in the COVID-19 pandemic. Two studies were conducted in order to evaluate the new scale’s psychometric properties. Study 1 included 269 Italian participants (77.3% female) to initially test the scale’s structure and construct validity. Study 2 involved 1061 (76.2% female) Italians aged 18 to 80 years old and examined the structure of the scale, construct validity, and age invariance. Exploratory and Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the one-factor solution, and the structure of the scale was found to be invariant across age groups. The scale also demonstrated a high internal reliability. The CoRP correlated positively with the fear of COVID-19 scale, and low with the Impact of Event and distressing phenomena as measured by GHQ. The present work thus affirms that the CoRP is a valid instrument for measuring individuals’ risk perception of COVID-19.