Lockdown Young Adult Concerns Scale (LYACS): The Development and Validation Process

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic as well as the social, relational, and economic transformations of the lockdown had a strong traumatic impact on the mental health of the word population, even more so on specific targets such as young adults. The spread of what was an unknown virus and the lockdown experience have raised concerns for the preservation of people’s physical and mental health and their private, relational, and work life. Objectives: The current study presents the construction, development, and validation process of the Lockdown Young Adult Concerns Scale (LYACS), an instrument assessing the level of two principal concerns during the pandemic lockdown, i.e., Loss of Life Control (CLLC) and Infection/Contagion (CIF). Methods: After a pilot study that defined the dimensions, selected the items, and carried out Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on a sample of 100 subjects (M = 24; DS = 3.9), a new sample of 259 Italian young adults (ages 18-35 yrs.; M = 24; SD = 3.8) was used to assess the psychometric validity of LYACS through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), reliability, convergent and divergent validity. Further descriptive analyses of the final version of scale as well as Two-way Analyses of Variance (ANOVA) on selected sociodemographic variables were conducted. Results: The outcome of Confirmatory Factor Analysis, which resulted in high goodness of fit (χ2/df = 2.0; GFI = .98; TLI = .98; RMSEA = .06; SRMR = .04), supports two identifiable factors reflecting the theoretically-based constructs of LYACS, thus supporting the EFA results. Furthermore, internal consistency as well as convergent and divergent validity analyses allow the scale to be considered a reliable and valid instrument for the present investigation. Finally, variance analysis shows that there are significant differences among the factor levels regarding gender, occupation, perception of the home space during lockdown, and having/not having worked on Concern about Loss of Life Control (CLLC), and between gender and confinement cohabitation on Concern about Infection/Contagion (CIF). Conclusion: Overall, the reported results show good psychometric proprieties for the scale and shed new light on how Italian young adults lived the COVID-19 pandemic.