Abstract
BackgroundThere is no special instrument to measure skills-based health literacy where it concerns infectious respiratory diseases. This study aimed to explore and evaluate a new skills-based instrument on health literacy regarding respiratory infectious diseases.MethodsThis instrument was designed to measure not only an individual’s reading and numeracy ability, but also their oral communication ability and their ability to use the internet to seek information. Sixteen stimuli materials were selected to enable measurement of the skills, which were sourced from the WHO, China CDC, and Chinese Center of Health Education. The information involved the distribution of epidemics, immunization programs, early symptoms, means of disease prevention, individual’s preventative behavior, use of medications and thermometers, treatment plans and the location of hospitals. Multi-stage stratified cluster sampling was employed to collect participants. Psychometric properties were used to evaluate the reliability and validity of the instrument.ResultsThe overall degree of difficulty and discrimination of the instrument were 0.693 and 0.482 respectively. The instrument demonstrated good internal consistency reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.864. As for validity, six factors were extracted from 30 items, which together explained 47.3% of the instrument’s variance. And based on confirmatory factor analysis, the items were grouped into five subscales representing prose, document, quantitative, oral and internet based information seeking skills (χ2 = 9.200, P>0.05, GFI = 0.998, TLI = 0.988, AGFI = 0.992, RMSEA = 0.028).ConclusionThe new instrument has good reliability and validity, and it could be used to assess the health literacy regarding respiratory infectious disease status of different groups.
Highlights
In recent years, the viruses SARS, influenza (H5N1 and H1N1) have broken out, and drug-resistant tuberculosis has made a resurgence, attracting public attention to infectious respiratory diseases
Due to the project’s background, this study aimed to develop a skills-based instrument to measure the health literacy concerned only with infectious respiratory diseases
Health literacy score increased as education levels and income rose, but declined along with age
Summary
The viruses SARS, influenza (H5N1 and H1N1) have broken out, and drug-resistant tuberculosis has made a resurgence, attracting public attention to infectious respiratory diseases. The most important feature of these diseases is that they can be prevented, controlled and cured. Correct preventive measures and health behavior can stop their spread to a very large extent. Health education and health promotion is both efficient and important in this field. Low health literacy can restrict and impact on the efficiency of health education, adoption of preventative measures and health behaviors. After more than 20 years’ development, health literacy has several different definitions. The Ratzan and Parker (2000) definition has been widely used. There is no special instrument to measure skills-based health literacy where it concerns infectious respiratory diseases. This study aimed to explore and evaluate a new skills-based instrument on health literacy regarding respiratory infectious diseases
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