Assessment of the Chinese Resident Health Literacy Scale in a population-based sample in South China

BMC Public Health

Research Article

Yan Chang¹  Zhenqiu Sun¹  Ming Hu¹  Siyun Liu¹  Minxue Shen² 

[1] Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Central South University, 110 Xiangya Road, 410078, Changsha, Hunan, China;Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Central South University, 110 Xiangya Road, 410078, Changsha, Hunan, China;Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, 501 Smyth Road, K1G 8L6, Ottawa, ON, Canada;

关键词: Health literacy;    Item response theory;    Confirmatory factor analysis;    Measurement invariance;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12889-015-1958-0

 received in 2015-03-04, accepted in 2015-06-22,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA national health literacy scale was developed in China in 2012, though no studies have validated it. In this investigation, we assessed the reliability, construct validity, and measurement invariance of that scale.MethodsA population-based sample of 3731 participants in Hunan Province was used to validate the Chinese Resident Health Literacy Scale based on item response theory and classical test theory (including split-half coefficient, Cronbach’s alpha, and confirmatory factor analysis). Measurement invariance was examined by differential item functioning.ResultsThe overall Cronbach’s alpha of the scale was 0.95 and Spearman-Brown coefficient 0.94. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the test measured a unidimensional construct with three highly correlated factors. Highest discrimination was found among participants with limited to moderate health literacy. In all, 64 items were selected from the original scale based on factor loading, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, and discrimination and difficulty parameters in item response theory. Measurement invariance was significant but slight. According to the two-level linear model, health literacy was associated with education level, occupation, and income.ConclusionsThe 2012 national health literacy scale was validated, and 64 items were selected based on classical test theory and item response theory. The revised version of the scale has strong psychometric properties with minor measurement invariance.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Shen et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.