Short Form Health Literacy Questionnaire for surveying in rural areas

Domains assessed: Prose: Comprehension, Media Literacy, Information seeking: Interactive media navigation, Information seeking: Document, Conceptual Knowledge, Comprehension, Communication: Speaker, Communication: Listener, Appraisal, Application/function

Specific context: General

Validation sample population age: Adults: 18 to 64 years

Modes of administration in validation study: Paper and pencil, Face-to-face

Number of items: 12

Sample size in validation study: 440

Language of validated version: Vietnamese

Scoring categories: The short-form health literacy questionnaire (HLS-SF12), which has been validated in the general population of six Asian countries [32], was used to measure health literacy (HL). The values of Cronbach’s alpha and the goodness-of-fit index of the HLS-SF12 in the general Vietnamese population were 0.87 and 0.97, respectively [32]. People rated the perceived difficulty of each item on four-point Likert scales (1 = very difficult, 2 = difficult, 3 = easy, and 4 = very easy). The indices for HL were standardized to unified metrics from 0 to 50 using the formula; Index = (mean − 1) × (50/3), where Index is the specific index calculated, mean is the mean of all participating items for each individual, 1 is the minimal possible value of the mean (leading to a minimum value of the index of 0), 3 is the range of the mean, and 50 is the chosen maximum value of the new metric. Thus, an index value is obtained where 0 represents the lowest HL and 50 the highest HL [37].

Country where validated: Vietnam

Reliability (Cronbach Alpha): 0.79