A NEW CONCEPTUAL ORAL HEALTH LITERACY INSTRUMENT IN TURKISH: T-CMOHK

Abstract

Evaluating the oral health literacy (OHL) of individuals with appropriate instruments is necessary for public dental health prevention programs. To our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive OHL instrument in Turkish up to date. This study aimed at the adaptation of the Comprehensive Measure of Oral Health Knowledge (CMOHK) to Turkish and evaluating the OHL of participants. The first stage of this methodological study was the cultural adaptation process with forward and back translations, cognitive interviewing, and pilot test followed by psychometric evaluation. A three-part questionnaire containing sociodemographic questions, oral health behaviors, and Turkish CMOHK (T-CMOHK) was administered among 314 volunteered students in a vocational school in Ankara, in 2019. Validity was evaluated with linguistic, content, and construct validity. Internal consistency coefficients were analyzed. p≤0.05 was considered significant. Back-translation comparisons and content validity index (1.00) were good, cognitive pre-test showed the final translation was suitable and understandable. The mean age of 307 participants included was 20.51±1.49 with a majority of women (62.9%). Cronbach’s alpha (0.70), Kuder-Richardson-20 (0.71) and split-half (0.71) coefficients were satisfactory. Of the group, 38.8% had poor; 33.9% had fair and 27.3% had good OHL (mean score=14.21±3.49). Scores were significantly higher among the participants who visited the dentist in case of a dental problem than those who did not (p=0.022) and who recently visited a dentist than those who never had (p=0.007). T-CMOHK met the reliability and validity criteria for further research of the OHL of adults.