Development and evaluation of a new oral health literacy instrument among telugu speaking population: The indian oral health literacy measure.

PURPOSE

Oral health literacy (OHL) is a relatively unexplored construct in the Indian context. Most of the few previous studies estimating OHL among different populations of India used instruments that were either previously validated in a different country or not tested for psychometric properties. With this background, the objective of this study was to develop an Indian oral health literacy measure and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the instrument among Telugu speaking population of Andhra Pradesh (IOHLM-T).

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The initial version of the instrument after evaluated for face and content validity was tested for psychometric properties among 200 adult patients visiting the outpatient department of SIBAR Institute of Dental Sciences. Predictive validity of the instrument was checked by the association between IOHLM-T score and oral health impact profile (OHIP-14), decayed-missing-filled teeth (DMFT) scores. Convergent validity was tested by assessing the correlation between IOHLM-T score and rapid estimate of adult literacy in dentistry (REALD-30) score.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

SPSS version 20 software was used to analyse the data. Independent samples t-test, Pearson's correlation, one-way ANOVA and stepwise multiple linear regression were done to analyse the data.

RESULTS

IOHLM-T demonstrated good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha 0.75), convergent validity (r = 0.34 between Reald-30 and IOHLM-T scores) and predictive validity (significant negative correlation of IOHLM-T with OHIP-14 and DMFT scores).

CONCLUSION

IOHLM-T demonstrates good face validity, content validity, predictive validity, convergent validity and internal consistency reliability and thus can be used among different populations in India after translation to the corresponding languages and evaluation of psychometric properties.