COVID-19 Pandemic Mental Health Questionnaire (CoPaQ)

The CoPaQ (https://osf.io/3evn9/) [24] is a newly developed and highly comprehensive self-report measure assessing the psychosocial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the purpose of this study, we included data of an index assessing the impact of COVID-19-specific stressors over the past 2 weeks from the CoPaQ. Individual stressors included among others quarantine/curfew, small accommodation/home-office, financial difficulties, childcare responsibilities, and physical health concerns; we provide a full list of items in Table ​Table11 and Supplementary Fig. 2 depicts COVID-19-specific stressors inter-item correlations. Each stressor was rated using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (Not at all) to 4 (Very much) and participants’ responses of “Not applicable” were recoded as 0. A sum score of all items was calculated as an index of COVID-19-specific stressors with higher scores indicating a greater stressor impact. We observed an acceptable internal consistency of the COVID-19-specific stressors scores with McDonald’s Omega (ω) = 0.79 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.75–0.84). It is important to note, however, that stressors are likely to occur relatively independently, so a high internal consistency was not necessarily presumed.

Socio-demographics and baseline characteristics of the matched clinical and non-clinical samples

n indicates the number of participants. SD Standard Deviation