6. MEASURING DIGITAL HEALTH LITERACY : DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF THE DIGITAL HEALTH LITERACY INSTRUMENT (DHLI)
Researchers:
Rosalie van der Vaart and Stans Drossaert
Keywords:
Digital Health Literacy, Instrument, validation
Description:
With the digitization of health care and the wide availability of Web-based applications, a broad set of skills is essential to properly use such facilities; these skills are called digital health literacy or eHealth literacy. In this project we developed and validated the Digital Health Literacy Instrument (DHLI) , which measures operational skills, navigation skills, information searching, evaluating reliability, determining relevance, adding self-generated content, and protecting privacy. The DHLI can be accepted as a new self-report measure to assess digital health literacy, using multiple subscales. Its performance-based items provide an indication of actual skills but should be studied and adapted further. Future research should examine the acceptability of this instrument in other languages and among different populations.
Products:
The article in which the validation of the instrument is described can be found here: https://www.jmir.org/2017/1/e27/ The DHLI instrument can be obtained free of charge, from the researcher c.h.c.drossaert@utwente.nl for scientific purposes. Currently the instrument is being translated into multiple languages.