Cultural and linguistic adaption and testing of the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) among healthy people in Korea

Jin-Hee Park; Richard H Osborne; Hee-Jun Kim; Sun Hyoung Bae

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0271549

Cultural and linguistic adaption and testing of the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) among healthy people in Korea

PLoS One. 2022 Aug 1;17(8):e0271549. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271549. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Jin-Hee Park¹, Richard H Osborne², Hee-Jun Kim¹, Sun Hyoung Bae¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Nursing Research Institute of Nursing Science, Ajou University, Suwon, Korea.
² Centre for Global Health and Equity, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Abstract

Backgrounds: This study administered the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) among Korean adults to examine its factor structure, reliability, and validity.

Methods: The HLQ items were translated and culturally adapted to the Korean context. The convenience sampling method was used, and data were collected. The difficulty level, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using diagonal weighted least squares (DWLS) estimator in R, discriminant validity, and composite reliability were performed.

Results: The easiest scale to obtain a high score was "Scale 4. Social support for health" and the hardest was "Scale 7. Navigating the healthcare system." Nine one-factor models fitted well. The nine-factor structural equation model fitted the data well. All HLQ scales were homogenous, with composite reliability.

Conclusions: The Korean version of the HLQ has a strong construct and high composite reliability when applied to Korean adults.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Health Literacy*
Humans
Linguistics
Psychometrics
Reproducibility of Results
Republic of Korea
Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

JHP and SHB were funded through the Department of Nursing, Graduate School, Ajou University in Korea in 2021 and 2018, respectively. RHO was funded in part through a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia Principal Research Fellowship (APP1155125). The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.