Development and Validation of the Health Literacy Scale for Workers

Abstract

Background: Health literacy has received growing attention in recent years to reduce health disparities. Health literate individuals can gain access, understand and use health information to maintain, improve and promote good health. Objective: To develop and assess the psychometric properties of a tool for the measurement of health literacy among workers, the Health Literacy Scale for Workers (HELSW). Methods: 15 companies were selected from the factories of the industrial city of Saveh. 450 (400 male and 50 female) workers from Saveh, Iran, were selected through a multistage random sampling. The study had two stages—a qualitative and a quantitative stage. In the qualitative phase, the workers' beliefs were extracted based on 61 in-depth interviews. Content validity was assessed with the help of 12 experts in the field of health education, public health and occupational health. Also, face validity was evaluated through interviewing with 20 workers. In the quantitative phase, the reliability of the questionnaire was evaluated by measuring the internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The construct validity was assessed by the principal component analysis using varimax rotation. Results: In the exploratory factor analysis, six domains (ie, access, reading, understanding, assessment, decision making and applying health information, and self-efficacy) with 34 items were loaded; the model explained 64.3% of the total variance. Intraclass correlation coefficient and test-retest reliability ranged from 0.72 to 0.84 and 0.69 to 0.86, respectively. Conclusion: It seems that the developed Persian questionnaire, HELSW, is a reliable and valid measure of the health literacy in workers.

Factors affecting breast-feeding practice among a sample of Iranian women: a structural equation modeling approach

“…A previous study indicated that the perceived social support was a social and facilitating psychological factor of health behavior able to solve behavioral problems and barriers in supported people and stabilize their proper behavior [34]. Our research further proved that the more the spouses and health volunteers encourage mothers to opt for exclusive breastfeeding, the more the mother’s intention for exclusive breastfeeding will increase, which is consistent with previous studies [27, 28, 35], indicating that social support is an important and predictive variable in health behaviors such as breastfeeding. Similarly, Giles et al [36], mentioned the supportive roles of mothers, spouses, family, close friends, and health workers in the continuity of breastfeeding and stated that breastfeeding played more important roles in the start and end of the breastfeeding period, with training physicians and nurses also playing important roles in this regard.…”

“…In quantitative method, both content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) were calculated. Regarding CVR, values > 0.56 were considered “acceptable”, and concerning CVI, values > 0.79 were considered acceptable [27].…”

Work-Related Health Literacy: A Scoping Review to Clarify the Concept

“…Continuing with health literacy as an employee’s individual competence, we present instruments for the measurement of individual work-related health literacy (RQ 3) as result of our literature search. The three self-administered questionnaires were developed and validated within different working populations in the languages Persian [ 67 ], English [ 68 ], and Thai [ 69 ]. Qualitative and quantitative methods were applied for the development and validation of the measurement instruments.…”

Development and psychometric evaluation of the healthy lifestyle questionnaire for elderly (heal)

“…Then, the quantitative content validity was performed by estimating the content validity ratio (CVR) and the content validity index (CVI). Regarding the CVR, the experts were asked about the necessity of each item, and a CVR value of > 0.45 was considered acceptable [22]. Regarding the CVI, the criteria of relevance, clarity, and simplicity of the items were assessed and a CVI value of > 0.79 was considered acceptable.…”