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Validation of a brief measure of HIV health‐related anxiety among women living with HIV
Author(s) -
Schulte Marya T.,
Marelich William D.,
Payne Diana L.,
Tarantino Nicholas,
Armistead Lisa P.,
Murphy Debra A.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
research in nursing and health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.836
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1098-240X
pISSN - 0160-6891
DOI - 10.1002/nur.21876
Subject(s) - anxiety , psychosocial , confirmatory factor analysis , clinical psychology , exploratory factor analysis , distress , construct validity , psychology , coping (psychology) , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , psychometrics , predictive validity , scale (ratio) , medicine , psychiatry , structural equation modeling , family medicine , statistics , physics , mathematics , quantum mechanics
Anxiety symptoms related to health are often present in populations coping with chronic illness, and among women living with HIV (WLWH), anxiety has been linked to a range of negative outcomes. This paper describes the validation of a four‐item instrument designed to measure health‐related anxiety (HRA) in WLWH by assessing the impact of thinking about HIV status and health on difficulty sleeping, lack of appetite, reduced desire to socialize, and difficulty concentrating at school or work. The scale was administered to 238 adult WLWH across three studies. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a one‐factor solution; multi‐group confirmatory factor invariance analyses supported the single factor model. For construct and criterion validity, correlations between the HRA scale and validated instruments measuring psychological, psychosocial, and physical distress were as predicted. Results support the validity of the HRA scale among WLWH as a brief measure of anxiety related to HIV status and health.