Development of Measurement Scale and its Reliability and Validity Test of Medical College Students' Medication Literacy
Authors: Zeng Leixiao , Sun Xiaonan , Lutong Pan , Wenjing Gu , Wenjing Gu , Jingqi Tang , Wenting Dai , Wu Yibo 
Published: February 2023

AbstractWhat is known and objective: Irrational drug use has become a global problem threatening human health. As future doctors, pharmacists and other relevant professionals, medical college students' medication literacy is also very important, which means the mastery of college students' knowledge to use medicine will directly affect the public's level of medication literacy in the future. The purpose of this study was to develop a medication literacy scale based on the existing health literacy scale and to test its reliability and validity.Methods: The initial scale was formed through literature review, and it was modified through expert consultation and student interviews to form the initial scale from March 17, 2020 to May 12. In 2020, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 1283 students in a medical college, from which 1248 valid questionnaires were collected, and 540 samples were drawn according to a certain proportion, which was divided into two equal parts for item analysis, reliability test, validity test, etc.Results: The total Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.826(&gt; 0.800), while the Cronbach's α coefficients of functional medication literacy, communicative medication literacy, and critical medication literacy were 0.901, 0.858, 0.851(&gt; 0.800), and the value of half reliability was 0.852 (&gt; 0.800), which indicated that the scale had good internal consistency reliability. Factor analysis of 14 items showed that KMO=0. 852(&gt; 0.7) and Bartlett spherical test P&lt; 0.001, indicating that the data were very suitable for factor analysis. Three principal axis factors were extracted by principal component analysis, and the total variance interpretation rate was 69.031% (&gt;40%). The chi-square freedom ratio χ²/df was 2.623&lt; 3(sample size 270), GFI=0.905&gt;0.9(Goodness of Fit index), CFI=0.950&gt;0.9 (Comparative Fit Index), RMSEA=0.078&lt;0.1(Ratio of Chi-square Degrees of Freedom), NFI=0.922&gt;0.9 (Normed Fitindex Standard Fitting Index), TLI=0.938&gt;0.9 (Tucker-Lewis index), all within the acceptable range, indicating that the model fits the survey data as a whole. The model fit is scientific and the effective scale has high validity. The data showed that the average variance of the three dimensions was 0.692, 0.606, 0.578, all of which were greater than 0.5 and the composite reliability was 0.918, 0.884, 0.845, all of which were greater than 0.7, indicating that the scale had high aggregation validity. The square roots of the average variance extraction amount of the three dimensions (the value of diagonal was 0.832, 0.778, 0.760) were greater than the absolute value of the correlation coefficient among the three dimensions (the absolute value of the lower triangle was 0.748, 0.101, 0.037), which shows that the discrimination validity among the three dimensions of the scale is good.What is new and conclusion: A new scale for evaluating the medication literacy of medical college students was developed in Chinese language preliminarily. The reliability and validity of this scale were verified in the study, suggesting its appropriateness and applicability to measure medication literacy level for Chinese students from medical college from three dimensions: functional medication literacy, communicative medication literacy and critical medication literacy, including 14 items. The medication literacy scale has good reliability and validity and can be used as a preliminary measurement tool for medical students' medication literacy.