Development of a perceived eHealth literacy scale for individuals with serious mental illness: A cross-sectional study

Background

The development of an electronic health literacy scale for the population with serious mental illness (SMI) is needed due to individuals' characteristics.

Aim

Develop a graphic-based perceived electronic health literacy scale for SMI (GP-eHLS-SMI).

Design

A cross-section study.

Methods

This study was conducted from May 2023 to February 2024. The GP-eHLS-SMI was constructed based on qualitative interviews. Experts reviewed the items, and a pilot questionnaire was developed. A total of 436 community-dwelling participants with SMI from 20 medical facilities were recruited for psychometric analysis. Ten questionnaires were invalid, and 426 questionnaires were used for analysis. We used the first 220 questionnaires to perform the item and exploratory factor analyses. The last 206 questionnaires were used for confirmatory factor analysis. All valid questionnaires were used to examine test-retest reliability and criterion validity. Research tools included a demographic data questionnaire, the GP-eHLS-SMI, and the Chinese eHealth Literacy Scale (C-eHEALS). The C-eHEALS was used as the gold standard to explore the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) and cut-off point of the GP-eHLS-SMI.

Results

The Cronbach's alpha for the 16-item GP-eHLS-SMI was 0.882. The GP-eHLS-SMI score was significantly correlated with the C-eHEALS score (r = 0.733, p < .001). The AUC was 0.863 (95 % CI: 0.828, 0.897), and the cut-off point was 41. The test-retest reliability was r = 0.929 (p < .001), and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.961.

Conclusion

The GP-eHLS-SMI is a valuable tool.