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Health Anxiety

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Health anxiety is referred to as the concern about ones health in the absence of a pathology, or excessive concern when there is a degree of pathology (Lucock & Morley, 1996). The Health Anxiety Questionnaire
The Health Anxiety Questionnaire (Lucock & Morley, 1996) was used to identify the participant’s level of concern regarding their health. In order to promote research in the health anxiety area, a reliable and valid measure of health anxiety based on sound theoretical background was needed. The construct was also developed to demonstrate its distinctiveness from measures of general anxiety (Lucock & Morley, 1996).

The scale is comprised of 21 items, and includes four factors of health anxiety, namely: health worry and preoccupation, fear of illness and death, reassurance-seeking behaviour, and interference with life. Participants were presented with the list of questions about health anxiety, for example “Do you ever worry about health?”, asked to read them carefully, and indicate how often they had been bothered by each statement during the past week including the day they responded to the survey. A four-point Likert scale was used, where 0 = “not at all or rarely”, and 3 = “most of the time”. Scores were calculated by adding the numbers within each factor. …show more content…

Cluster analysis: Inter-item correlations from cluster shows that intercorrelations between four clusters of items (interference with life, fear of illness and death, health worry and preoccupation, and reassurance seeking behaviour) were all significant ( r ranging from .295 to .685).
Factor analysis: Principal component analysis revealed eigenvalues greater than one for all four factors. All

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