MVishnu Vardhana Rao, Saritha Nair, Aparna Joshi, Sumit Aggarwal, Tulsi Adhikari, Nupur Mahajan, Vishal Diwan, A Stephen, KRekha Devi, BijayaKumar Mishra, GirijeshKumar Yadav, Rewa Kohli, Damodar Sahu, BalKishan Gulati, Saurabh Sharma, Jeetendra Yadav, Senthanro Ovung, Chetna Duggal, Moina Sharma, SampadaDipak Bangar, Rushikesh Andhalkar, PricillaB Rebecca, S Rani, Pradeep Selvaraj, GladstonG Xavier, Vanessa Peter, Basilea Watson, T Kannan, KS MD. Asmathulla, Debdutta Bhattacharya, Jyotirmayee Turuk, SubrataKumar Palo, Srikanta Kanungo, AjitKumar Behera, AshokKumar Pandey, Kamran Zaman, BrijRanjan Misra, Niraj Kumar, SthitaPragnya Behera, Rajeev Singh, AbuHasan Sarkar, Kanwar Narain, Rajni Kant, Seema Sahay, RajnarayanRamshankar Tiwari, BeenaElizabeth Thomas, and Samiran Panda
COVID-19 pandemic has triggered social stigma towards individuals affected and their families. This study describes the process undertaken for the development and validation of scales to assess stigmatizing attitudes and experiences among COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 participants from the community.COVID-19 Stigma Scale and Community COVID-19 Stigma Scale constituting 13 and six items, respectively, were developed based on review of literature and news reports, expert committee evaluation and participants' interviews through telephone for a multicentric study in India. For content validity, 61 (30 COVID-19-recovered and 31 non-COVID-19 participants from the community) were recruited. Test-retest reliability of the scales was assessed among 99 participants (41 COVID-19 recovered and 58 non-COVID-19). Participants were administered the scale at two-time points after a gap of 7-12 days. Cronbach's alpha, overall percentage agreement and kappa statistics were used to assess internal consistency and test-retest reliability.Items in the scales were relevant and comprehensible. Both the scales had Cronbach's α above 0.6 indicating moderate-to-good internal consistency. Test-retest reliability assessed using kappa statistics indicated that for the COVID-19 Stigma Scale, seven items had a moderate agreement (0.4-0.6). For the Community COVID-19 Stigma Scale, four items had a moderate agreement.Validity and reliability of the two stigma scales indicated that the scales were comprehensible and had moderate internal consistency. These scales could be used to assess COVID-19 stigma and help in the development of appropriate stigma reduction interventions for COVID-19 infected, and mitigation of stigmatizing attitudes in the community.