“Introduction: The pandemic has caused fear, especially due to the daily disseminated news; however, there is not an instrument to measure this fear in multiple realities. Objective: To validate a scale for Latin American perception of fear and concern transmitted by the media during the pandemic. Methodology: This is an instrumental study. The survey was based on an instrument which was pre-validated in Peru and submitted to 15 experts in almost 10 countries. Subsequently, thousands of people were surveyed in 13 Latin American countries, whose answers were used for descriptive statistics for validation. Results: Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) generated two re-specifications, where four items were eliminated from the original scale. With these changes, the global goodness of fit (absolute and incremental) were satisfactory (CFI ¼ 0.978; TLI ¼ 0.964; GFI ¼ 0.976; AGFI ¼ 0.949; R...

“Introduction: The pandemic has caused fear, especially due to the daily disseminated news; however, there is not an instrument to measure this fear in multiple realities. Objective: To validate a scale for Latin American perception of fear and concern transmitted by the media during the pandemic. Methodology: This is an instrumental study. The survey was based on an instrument which was pre-validated in Peru and submitted to 15 experts in almost 10 countries. Subsequently, thousands of people were surveyed in 13 Latin American countries, whose answers were used for descriptive statistics for validation. Results: Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) generated two re-specifications, where four items were eliminated from the original scale. With these changes, the global goodness of fit (absolute and incremental) were satisfactory (CFI ¼ 0.978; TLI ¼ 0.964; GFI ¼ 0.976; AGFI ¼ 0.949; R...