Study on the development of an infectious disease-specific health literacy scale in the Chinese population

Abstract

ObjectivesTo develop a scale to assess infectious disease-specific health literacy (IDSHL) in China and test its initial psychometric properties.MethodsItem pooling, reduction and assessment of psychometric properties were conducted. The scale was divided into 2 subscales; subscale 1 assessed an individual's skills to prevent/treat infectious diseases and subscale 2 assessed cognitive ability. In 2014, 9000 people aged 15–69 years were randomly sampled from 3 provinces and asked to complete the IDSHL questionnaire. Cronbach's α was calculated to assess reliability. Exploratory factor analysis, t-test, correlations, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and logistic regression were used to examine validity.ResultsEach of the 22 items in subscale 1 had a content validity index >0.8. In total, 8858 people completed the scale. The principal components factor analysis suggested a 5-factor solution. All factor loadings were >0.40 (p<0.05). The IDSHL score was 22.07±7.91 (mean±SD; total score=38.62). Significant differences were observed across age (r=−0.276), sex (males: 21.65±8.03; females: 22.47±7.78), education (14.16±8.19 to 26.55±6.26), 2-week morbidity (present: 20.62±8.17, absent: 22.35±7.83; p<0.001) and health literacy of the highest and lowest 27% score groups (all p<0.05). The ROC curve indicated that 76.2% of respondents were adequate in IDSHL. Binary logistic regression analysis revealed 12 predictors of IDSHL adequacy (p<0.05). Among the 22 remaining items, Corrected Item-Total Correlation ranged from 0.316 to 0.504 and Cronbach's α values ranged from 0.754 to 0.810 if the items were deleted. The overall α value was 0.839 and the difficulty coefficient ranged from 1.19 to 4.08. For subscale 2, there were statistically significant differences between the mean scores of those with a correct/incorrect answer (all p<0.001).ConclusionsThe newly developed 28-item scale provides an efficient, psychometrically sound and user-friendly measure of IDSHL in the Chinese population.

The Impact of Risk Perception on Social Distancing during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China

“…For example, initial items for RP were generated following previous questionnaires conducted by Dionne et al [ 45 ] and Kim et al [ 53 ]. Measurement items of PU were compiled based on the infectious disease-specific health literacy scale [ 54 ] and the study by Qazi et al [ 46 ]. The SC instrument statements were taken from the literature review and previously completed research [ 51 , 55 , 56 ].…”

Health Literacy Regarding Infectious Disease Predicts COVID-19 Preventive Behaviors: A Pathway Analysis

“…The IDSHL scale was divided into 2 subscales 12 : skills to prevent infectious disease (22 items, with an overall Cronbach's coefficient of 0.839) and cognitive ability (6 items requiring reading and comprehension). The first subscale contained 4 domains: infectious-disease-related knowledge (7 items), disease prevention (7 items), management or treatment (4 items), and pathogen and infection source identification (4 items).…”

COVID-19 outbreak improves attractiveness of medical careers in Chinese senior high school students

“…Students’ questionnaire included sex, name of high school, academic year, performance level, educational level and occupation of parents, degree preferences including willingness to learn medicine (prior and post COVID-19 outbreak), preferred medical career (clinician, public health practitioner, pharmacist, nurses, or others), and main motivations for selecting or unselecting medical study. The question regarding the preference before the COVID outbreak was designed as “Before the COVID outbreak, did you have a plan to apply for medical school?” An Infectious Disease-Specific Health Literacy Scale (IDSHL) developed by Tian, et al [ 26 ] was adopted to assess student’s health literacy.…”

“…The IDSHL was developed, tested and validated in the Chinese population in 2014 [ 26 ], and was used to assess health literacy level of the students on infectious diseases in this study. The self-reported scale includes 28 items, with a total score ranging from 0 to 100.…”