Volume 24, Issue 105, September - October, 2020

Reliability and Validity of Arabic Translation of the Impact of Event Scale-Revised for COVID-19 Pandemic

Hatim Yousef Alharbi^1♦, Sami S. ALHarthi², Ahmed S. Alzahrani³

¹Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Qassim University, Qassim – buraydah, KSA
²Medicine Department, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia
³Preventive Medicine Department, Armed Forced Hospital, Madina, Saudi Arabia

^♦Corresponding author
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Qassim University, Qassim – buraydah, KSA; Email: hy.alharbi@qu.edu.sa

ABSTRACT

Objective: This study aims to translate and validate the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) into the Arabic language with a population of medical students at two different universities in Saudi Arabia. Method: Fifty-six male and female medical students were tested during different periods of quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic using both original and translated versions of the IESR. Results: The Arabic IES-R has acceptable internal consistency, with the following alpha coefficients: Intrusion (Cronbach’s α= 0.85), Avoidance (Cronbach’s α= 0.75), Hyperarousal (Cronbach’s α= 0.74), and total IES-R score (Cronbach’s α= 0.88), all of which were significant (p-value< 0.01). The test-retest reliability of the Arabic scale examined with the same sample is high, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.75 to 0.81 (p-value< 0.01) for the three subscales and total score. The reliability-parallel form method of the Arabic IES-R with the original IES-R indicates excellent consistency between the two scales, with significant (p-value< 0.01) intraclass correlation ranging from 0.80 to 0.89 for its three subclasses and total score. Finally, a principal components analysis using Varimax rotation was performed with the 3-factor forced solution explains 50.5% of the variance and generated an intrusion factor (items 1,3,6,9,14,15), avoidance factor (items 5,8,11,17,22), and hyperarousal factor (items 2,4,10,12,16,18,19). Conclusion: The Arabic IES-R has proven to be a reliable and valid measure for posttraumatic stress symptoms in our sample of medical students in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Category: Psychiatry, psychometry, community.

Keywords: Stress event, COVID19, hyperarousal, trauma, distress

Medical Science, 2020, 24(105), 3051-3060

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