Construction of an evaluation index system for infectious disease specific health literacy among the public in China

Objective To construct an evaluation index system of infectious diseases specific health literacy (IDSHL) in Chinese public and to lay a foundation for developing tools of IDSHL assessment and related researches in China.Methods Literature review,expert nominal group technique (NGT),Delphi expert survey,weight calculation,and scoring and sorting with the technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) were used to construct and select primary,secondary,and tertiary indicators.Results Based on the outcomes of literature review and NGT,the initial IDSHL evaluation index system is composed of 5 primary indicators,22 secondary indicators and 56 tertiary indicators.The positive coefficient of the first Delphi experts survey was 76.67%,and the expert authority coefficient was 0.86.Based on the expert weighting of the second Delphi survey,the primary indexes include infectious disease related "knowledge","capacity of action","consciousness and concept","skills",and "the capability of information acquisition and understanding of infectious diseases prevention and control",with the corresponding TOPSIS scores of 0.76,0.64,0.59,0.46,and 0.25,respectively.Of the 56 tertiary indicators,43 were assigned the expert coordination coefficients of greater than 0.9.There were 29 and 48 tertiary indicators being assigned the combined scores of greater than 1.5 and 1.0.Synthetically considering the results of experts' assessment and TOPSIS sorting,10 tertiary indicators and 3 secondary indicators were exclude and finally,5 primary,19 secondary,and 46 tertiary indicators were selected to form the index system.Conclusion The infectious disease specific health literacy index system constructed is of high surface validity and could be adopted to describe and explain infectious disease specific health literacy among the public in China.