JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Electronic health is an important factor that influences the use and receipt of benefits from web-based health resources. Consequently, the concept of eHealth literacy has emerged and in 2006 Norman and Skinner developed an 8-item self-report eHealth literacy scale to measure these skills: the eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS). However, the eHEALS has not been tested for validity in the general Swedish population.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to translate and adapt the eHEALS into a Swedish version and to evaluate its psychometric properties.

Methods:

Prospective psychometric evaluation study including 323 participants equally distributed between sex and with a mean age of 49 years.

Results:

There were some difficulties translating the English concept Health resources. This resulted in this concept being translated as Health information, i.e. Hälsoinformation in Swedish. The eHEALS total score was 29.3 (SD 6.2), Cronbach’s alpha 0.94, Spearman-Brown coefficient 0.96 and with a high responsiveness of 94.6%. All a priori hypotheses were confirmed, supporting convergent validity. The test-retest reliability indicated an almost perfect agreement, 0.86 (p< 0.001). An exploratory factor analysis found one component explaining 69% of the total variance. No floor or ceiling effect was noted.

Conclusions:

The Swedish version of eHEALS was assessed as being unidimensional and the internal consistency of the instrument high, making the reliability adequate. However, there are some linguistic issues relating to the concept of Health resources.