Development and Validation of Vocabulary Oral Health Literacy Scale

Purpose: Literacy is the ability of a person to read and write. Most of the adult population struggle to understand basic information regarding health and oral health due to lack of literacy. There are several tools to assess the oral health literacy of adult population. The main disadvantage with other scales were the pronunciation of the words as it varies in India. Hence a new one named Vocabulary Oral Health Literacy Scale was formulated to overcome this problem. The aim of this study was to develop and Validate Vocabulary Oral Health Literacy Scale with four different domains. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 104 subjects belonging to the age group of 16–60 years residing in Puducherry. Approval was obtained from Institutional ethical committee before the start of the study. A simple random sampling was used to select the study subjects. The data was collected using a well-structured proforma. The proforma consisted of two parts. The first part collected demographic data and the second part consisted of 10 common dental words for word recognition, 10 pictures for identification, 10 words with missing letters, and 5 lines for word comprehension. The data were entered in Microsoft excel spreadsheet and analysis was done using IBM Corp. Released 2012. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 21.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp. Results: A total of 104 subjects were included of which 41% were male and 58% were female with mean age of 20.95 ± 9.24 and 20.19 ± 5.39, respectively. Reliability tests revealed Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.723 and split half reliability value of 0.815. There was a positive correlation between all the four domains of VOHLS, Word recognition versus picture recognition (0.420); Word recognition versus filling the words (0.421); Word recognition versus comprehension (0.429); picture recognition versus filling the words (0.507); picture recognition versus comprehension (0.211); and comprehension versus filling the words (0.477). Conclusion: The Vocabulary Oral Health Literacy Scale showed a good reliability in the assessment of oral health literacy among the study population. There was a positive correlation between all the domains of the scale which shows good internal consistency in the scale. Hence, this scale can be used on a larger population to assess the oral health Literacy.