E-health literacy is a composite skill and requires people to be able to work with technology, think critically, and navigate a wide range of information tools and resources to obtain the information needed to make decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by “infodemia,” a term used to quickly spread false information or fake news through social networks and other sources of information. These are the reasons that point to the importance of e-health literacy in the world.
To measure e-health literacy, we have the eHEALS instrument at our disposal, which we translated and included in our questionnaire. eHEALS is an eight-question e-health literacy instrument developed to measure knowledge about finding, assessing and using internet information for health problems. We developed and validated a questionnaire to measure e-health literacy related to the COVID -19 pandemic in Slovenia.
In the first part, the questionnaire includes all items of the already established eHEALS questionnaire for measuring e-health literacy. The second part consists of questions about finding, understanding, assessing and using information from the internet. We used a five-point Likert response scale. In the third part of the questionnaire, we used a task to test the e-health literacy of the respondents. The last section of the questionnaire contains questions on socio-demographic data.
The questionnaire was first pilot tested on a sample of 20 people. The final version of the questionnaire was answered by 518 people who completed the questionnaire on the Valicon web panel.
The results were analysed with the programmes SPSS and AMOS. First, we analysed the socio-demographic data using descriptive statistics. The reliability of our instrument was tested using Cronbach's alpha between a 1-factor and a 4-factor model. With the 1-factor model, a higher reliability of the construct was obtained.
The validity of the instrument was verified by confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression. According to the indices, the 4-factor model is superior to 1-factor model since it includes questions grouped into 4 domains that are much more similar to each other than in the 1-factor model. The 4-factor model provides a better fit to experimental data compared to 1-factor model.
The multiple linear regression analysis revealed a statistically significant association between higher e-health literacy and higher educational attainment, higher monthly net income and larger respondent settlement. In the task where we assessed actual literacy compared to implemented e-health literacy, we obtained very low correlations between self-perceived and actual e-health literacy. All correlations between the individual domains were statistically significant.
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