Pilot study on development of oral health literacy evaluation tool for Korean adults / 대한구강보건학회지

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: Oral health literacy is defined as 'the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic oral health information and services needed to make an appropriate health decision'. This goal of this study was to develop an instrument for assessing oral health literacy in Korean adults. METHODS: This instrument was developed by using the adult literacy evaluation tool of the Korean Government. The components were mainly related to 2 conditions ('oral health information' and 'dental treatment instruction'), and they were classified into 3 cognitive processes (realistic, deductive, and critical domains). Furthermore, all of the subcomponents were divided into prose and non-prose. Therefore, each of the 12 subcomponents had 4 items, resulting in a final questionnaire with 48 items. A pilot survey was conducted in 51 adults, and the quality of the questionnaire was subsequently evaluated. We identified reliability by using Cronbach's alpha, discrimination, and difficulty. Two items from each of the 12 subcomponents were selected as the final items. We set the difference thresholds at over 0.5 and over 0.3 for reliability and discrimination, respectively. Finally, we distributed the difficulty from 35 to 95%. RESULTS: The reliabilities of all items (48) and the final items (24) were 0.838 and 0.836, respectively. The mean discrimination of the final items was higher than that of all items (mean 0.5 and 0.3, respectively). The difficulty curve of the final items followed a normal distribution. CONCLUSIONS: The reliability and validity demonstrated by the final 24 items indicates that they are appropriate for evaluating oral health literacy in adults.