Development and validation of fear of missing out scale among Chinese college students

Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) is a common phenomenon among contemporary young people. It refers to negative emotions such as unease and anxiety that occur when young people think they miss out on beneficial things that others are doing or experiencing. This negative emotion harms individual behavior and physical and mental health. The FoMO instrument measures the fear of missing out in individuals. However, because of the cultural differences that influence the understood bias and the distinct structure of the psychological measurement, the existing FoMO scale cannot be used with Chinese college students. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a FoMO scale based on individual psychology, which would be suitable for localization in China, and to measure its reliability and validity. The newly developed fear of missing out scale (CFoMOs) contained 15 items, and 4 factors: missing motivation, missing cognition, missing emotion, and missing behaviors. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that the cumulative variance contribution rate was 65.22%. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that the CFoMOs had good construct validity (chi(2)/df = 1.93, TLI = .90, CFI = 0.95, RMSEA = 0.05). The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of all subscales ranged from 0.73 to 0.79, the omega (omega) coefficients of all subscales ranged from 0.73 to 0.80, and the test-retest reliabilities were between 0.56 and 0.72. There was a significant moderate correlation between the subscales of the CFoMOs (r = 0.25-0.43, p < 0.01), and a significant positive correlation between each dimension and the total score (r = 0.64-0.72, p < 0.01). The CFoMOs had no significant difference based on sex and had metric invariance. Scores on the dimension of missing behavior and the total scale differed significantly, while the other dimensions had no significant difference based on the location of registered permanent residence. In the study, the CFoMOs had good reliability and validity.