Validity and reliability testing of the Indonesian version of the eHealth Literacy Scale during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Nowadays, it is common for people to look for health care information on the internet. The eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS) is commonly used to measure eHealth literacy. As of the publication of this study, the Indonesian version for eHEALS has not been published even though eHealth literacy is necessary, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Indonesian version of eHEALS (I-eHEALS). A total of 100 respondents in East Java were involved in this cross-sectional study. Pearson-product moment correlation method and construct validity were used to validate the results. The reliability was determined based on the Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency measurement and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The Pearson correlation analysis results are significantly higher ( r > 0.254, p < 0.01) compared to the critical value table. Single factors accounting for 57.66% variance in the scales exhibit a unidimensional latent structure. The internal consistency between items is excellent as shown by the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (0.91). The ICC analysis shows an acceptable result (0.552, p < 0.01). The I-eHEALS is valid and reliable to be used for evaluating the eHealth literacy of the Indonesian population.

eHealth Literacy Instruments: Systematic Review of Measurement Properties

“…The characteristics of the included eHealth literacy instruments and studies are presented in Multimedia Appendix 2 [ 24 - 64 ]. The eHEALS, which consists of 8 items scored on a 5-point Likert scale, was originally developed in English [ 24 ], and its psychometrics have been studied in diverse languages: Amharic [ 50 ], Mandarin Chinese [ 26 ], Simplified Chinese [ 34 , 36 , 41 ], Dutch [ 25 ], English [ 27 - 30 , 47 , 53 , 54 , 57 , 58 ], German [ 39 , 44 ], Greek [ 48 ], Hebrew [ 45 ], Hungarian [ 37 ], Indonesian [ 43 ], Italian [ 31 , 33 ], Korean [ 32 , 42 , 55 ], Persian [ 38 , 46 ], Polish [ 35 ], Portuguese [ 52 ], Norwegian [ 49 , 56 ], Serbian [ 51 ], and Swedish [ 40 ]. The eHEALS has been used to evaluate diverse populations, including not only youths, adults, and older adults, but also healthy people, patients, caregivers, and health professionals in school, community, and clinic settings.…”

“…The single-factor structure of the eHEALS (ID, study identification numbers 1-29) [ 24 - 43 ] demonstrated insufficient moderate-quality evidence (62.1% of the results supported the single-factor structure). Internal consistency of the single-factor eHEALS was supported through a meta-analysis with a Cronbach’s α of 0.91 ( Figure 2 ), as well as a qualitative summary with an omega of 0.89-0.94, person reliability of 0.80-0.87, person separation index of 2.36, item reliability index of 0.89-0.93, and item separation index of 3.62-11.3, which were rated as sufficient and indicated that there existed multiple studies of very good quality.…”

A Comprehensive Analysis of E-Health Literacy Research Focuses and Trends

“…However, the scale is built based on the context of Britain and America, and only an English version available, so it has to be tested to see if it is also valid in other linguistic situations. As a consequence, researchers from around the world have translated eHEALS into nearly twenty languages for testing and evaluation, including Dutch [ 26 ], Japanese [ 27 ], German [ 28 ], Portuguese [ 29 ], Spanish [ 30 ], Turkish [ 31 ], Italian [ 32 ], Korean [ 33 ], Hungarian [ 34 ], Serbian [ 35 ], Polish [ 36 ], Chinese [ 37 ], Greek [ 38 ], Norwegian [ 39 ], Amharic [ 40 ], Swedish [ 41 ], Arabic [ 42 ], and Indonesian [ 43 ]. The findings indicated that the translated versions have high internal consistency and credibility.…”

Measuring Electronic Health Literacy: Development, Validation, and Test of Measurement Invariance of a Revised German Version of the eHealth Literacy Scale

“…Since its publication, the original eHEALS questionnaire has been translated into many languages, including Italian [ 34 , 35 ], Spanish [ 36 ], Dutch [ 37 ], Chinese [ 38 ], Serbian [ 39 ], Korean [ 40 ], Indonesian [ 41 ] and German [ 42 ]. However, some of these studies could not confirm the 1-factorial model as assumed by Norman and Skinner [ 16 ].…”