Abstract

Background: Trypophobia describes aversive responses to clustered visual patterns, but its epidemiology and cross-cultural measurement remain insufficiently studied. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Turkish Trypophobia Questionnaire (TQ) and examined factors associated with symptom severity.

Methods: This cross-sectional study included 261 community participants aged ≥15 years. Reliability and construct validity were assessed using internal consistency measures, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and parallel analysis. Independent associations with TQ scores were examined using multivariable linear regression with HC3 robust standard errors.

Results: The TQ showed high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.968; McDonald’s ω=0.970), but 61.7% of participants had the minimum score. Parallel analysis favored one factor, whereas one-factor CFA showed poor fit (CFI=0.768, TLI=0.726, RMSEA=0.230). Higher scores were independently associated with female sex and psychiatric disorders, while age and educational level showed inverse associations.

Conclusions: The Turkish TQ showed strong internal consistency, but its structural validity remains uncertain because of the marked floor effect and poor CFA fit. Further validation using independent samples and methods appropriate for ordinal data is needed.

Keywords: trypophobia, psychometric validation, reliability, construct validity, Türkiye

License

Copyright (c) 2026 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

How to Cite

1.
Gül SS, Aygün H. Psychometric validation of the Turkish Trypophobia Questionnaire and determinants of trypophobia symptoms in a community-based sample. J Trends Med Invest. 2026;2(2):82-91. https://doi.org/10.64512/JTMI.2026.31

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