Revalidation of the Religious Fatalism Scale before COVID-19 in Adults from Latin America

Abstract

Introduction: Some conflictive religious beliefs have become a threat to public health in Latin America in times of COVID-19.

Objective: To revalidate a religious fatalism scale before COVID-19 in adults from Latin America.

Methods: An instrumental study was conducted. Under a nonprobabilistic purposive sampling, 6206 adults participated, 60.1% of which were women aged 18-60 years (mean: 35.11; standard deviation: 9.59) from 14 Latin-American countries. The instrument to be revalidated was the modified religious fatalism scale before COVID-19 for Peruvian adults, which is made up of nine items and five response choices in Likert format. Content validity was analyzed using Aiken's V; internal structure, through confirmatory factor analysis; and reliability, with Cronbach's Alpha.

Results: All the items obtained a favorable evaluation (V > 0.70). Concerning the confirmatory factor analysis, the lack of fit was improved with the index modification technique, which led to eliminating items 2, 7 and 8; thus, satisfactory goodness-of-fit indices were obtained, which supports a unidimensional model made up of 6 items. Finally, reliability was acceptable (α = 0.89; 95 % CI: 0.88-0.89).

Conclusions: The religious fatalism scale before COVID-19 is a brief measure that shows validity and reliability evidences; therefore, it can be applied in research at the Latin-American level.