[Development and Evaluation of Health Empowerment Scale for North Korean Women Defectors].

PURPOSE

This study developed an instrument to evaluate the health empowerment of North Korean women refugees and examined its validity and reliability.

METHODS

Through literature review and focused group interviews, 66 preliminary items with three constructs, including perceived control, perceived competence, and goal internalization were selected based on Menon's psychological health empowerment model. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 239 North Korean women refugees in the community from August 31 to September 4, 2020. Content, construct, convergent, and discriminative validity were evaluated. Cronbach's α was used to evaluate the reliability of scale.

RESULTS

The final instrument consisted of 31 items with three factors that were identified through confirmatory factor analysis. The convergent validity showed that the correlation coefficient was .52 ( < .001), which confirmed the validity of the developed measurement tool. Cronbach's α for all the items was .94, and Cronbach's α for the factors was .76~.91.

CONCLUSION

This health empowerment scale has been developed to include aspects of health empowerment, provide a conceptual framework, and offer objective indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of a health education program.