Psychological Distress During COVID-19 Pandemic

Design, sample, and setting This is a cross-sectional study using an Internet-based self-administered questionnaire of closed-ended questions and using convenience sampling. In total, 612 undergraduate students completed the survey in Mansoura University.

Data collection Data was collected anonymously through an online questionnaire created using the technology of Google Forms provided by Google ™ and was constructed in Arabic language. The questionnaire consisted of three sections. The first section assessed students' baseline characteristics including sex, age, area of study, academic level, residence, marital status, family members infected, close people infected, and knowing someone who died of the infection.

The second section measured the psychosocial effects of COVID-19 pandemic using two instruments, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale, version 324 and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21).19 The UCLA Loneliness Scale is a widely used self-report instrument of loneliness consisting of 20 items designed to measure both emotional as well as social loneliness. Response of each item was rated on a four-point scale from (1) never to (4) always felt as expressed in each item. Final score ranges from 20 to 80 with higher scores demonstrating higher feelings of loneliness. The scale's reliability was found to be high with alpha coefficients ranging from 0.89 to 0.94 for samples of students. The Arabic version of UCLA Loneliness Scale was used in the current study according to the Arabic translation in Egyptian culture by Daswqee.20 The correlation coefficients values were 0.76 for females and 0.74 for males.