JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Providing people with understandable and actionable health information can promote healthy behaviors and outcomes considerably. To this end, some valid and reliable scales assessing the patient-friendliness of health education materials, like the PEMAT-P, have been well-developed in English-speaking countries. However, the English version of PEMAT has not been validated in simplified Chinese in mainland China.

Objective:

The current study sought to translate the PEMAT-P tool into simplified Chinese (C-PEMAT-P) and verify its validity and reliability for assessing the comprehensibility and actionability of health education resources written in simplified Chinese.

Methods:

We translated the PEMAT-P into the C-PEMAT-P in three steps: (i) forward-translation, (ii) back-translation, and (iii) testing translation equivalence linguistically and culturally. Any discrepancies between the original English tool and the back-translated English tool were settled through a panel discussion. We confirmed the validity of the C-PEMAT-P by calculating the content validity index. Two native Chinese speakers used the C-PEMAT-P to rate 15 health education handouts concerning air pollution and health. We calculated the Cohen’s kappa coefficient and the Cronbach’s alpha to determine the interrater agreement and internal consistency of the C-PEMAT-P.

Results:

We finalized the translated Chinese tool after discussing the differences between the two English versions (original and back-translated) of the PEMAT-P. The content validity index of the final C-PEMAT-P version was .969, the Cohen’s kappa coefficient for the interrater scoring agreement was .928, and the Cronbach’s alpha for internal consistency was .897.

Conclusions:

The C-PEMAT-P has been proven valid and reliable. It is the first Chinese scale for assessing the comprehensibility and actionability of Chinese health education materials.