COVID‐19 phobia across the world: Impact of resilience on COVID‐19 phobia in different nations

Lindinger‐Sternart, Sylvia; Kaur, Varinder; Widyaningsih, Yekti; Patel, Ashok Kumar

AIM: This research study focused on exploring the impact of resilience on COVID‐19 phobia (C19P) among individuals from different nations including a cluster of European countries, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the United States of America (USA). METHOD: We recruited research participants via disseminating an electronic survey on Facebook Messenger (FM) that included 812 participants. The electronic survey assessed unidentifiable demographic information, the COVID‐19 Phobia Scale (C19P‐S; Arpaci et al., 2020) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS; Smith et al, 2008). RESULTS: Based on simple linear regression, resilience had a statistically significant negative affect on all four C19P factors including psychological, psychosomatic, economic and social factors (p < .001). Resilience showed a statistically significant difference for at least two nations (p < .001) investigated in this research, as shown by using the Kruskal–Wallis test. Utilising linear regression analysis showed that age affects the resilience score positively significantly (p < .001). Based on the Kruskal–Wallis test, we found no statistically significant differences in resilience scores between genders, but found statistically significant differences in resilience scores based on marital status, educational level and professional status (p = .001). CONCLUSION: We concluded that the higher the resilience level, the lower the level of C19P. The level of resilience was highest in the USA, followed by Europe, Pakistan, India and Indonesia. Age affected the resilience level positively and resilience differed based on marital status, education levels, and professional status but not between genders. Implications are offered for effective counselling interventions during this COVID‐19 pandemic and the aftermath.