Fear of COVID-19 and quality of life effect on social phobia by using machine learning approaches

This research was conducted to determine the impact of COVID-19 fear and quality of life on social phobia.In the study, a Demographic Data Form was created for demographic characteristics, Liebowitz Social Phobia Scale was used to determine the level of social phobia, EUROHIS-WHOQOL-8 (Quality of Life Scale) was used to determine the Quality of Life level and FCV-19S (COVID-19 Fear Scale) was used to determine the level of COVID-19 Fear.While individuals over the age of 20, living in Turkey and those who have not received or have not received psychiatric treatment were included in the study, individuals who gave unrealistic or incorrect answers to the scale questions and demographic data form were excluded from the study.The study was carried out using the simple sampling method by reaching the final sampling amount of 1235 with 183 exclusions from 1418 samplings obtained between 26.01.2021 and 26.01.2022.The data were analyzed using R 4.1.2, Python 2022.4.0, weka-3.8.6 and JASP 0.16.1 programs.The significance level was determined as p = .05.Liebowitz Social Phobia levels and sub-dimensions; The level of fear of COVID-19 varied according to the status of contracting COVID-19 disease (p = 0.03), while the level of fear of COVID-19 varied according to the chronic disease status (p = <0.001) and the status of contracting COVID-19 disease (p = 0.014).Quality of life level: differed according to chronic disease status (p = <0.001) and COVID-19 disease status (p = 0.002).As a result, the increase in fear of COVID-19 increases the severity of social phobia and causes a decrease in the quality of life.In the following studies, it will be useful to distribute the sample evenly to independent variables and to cover a wider range of comorbid diseases.