Health literacy in Mainland China: validation of a functional health literacy test in simplified Chinese

Health literacy tests in the Chinese-speaking parts of the world have been mainly developed in traditional Chinese to be used in Hong Kong or Taiwan. So far no validated tool in simplified Chinese to assess functional health literacy in Mainland China has been developed. The aim of the study was to validate the simplified Chinese version of the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA). The traditional Chinese version was translated into simplified Chinese and 150 interviews in an outpatient department of a public hospital in Mainland China were conducted. Predictive validity was assessed by known predictors for health literacy and convergent validity by three health literacy screening questions. The Cronbach's alpha for the reading comprehension part was 0.94 and 0.90 for the numeracy items. Participants with lower education and men had significantly lower levels of health literacy. The reading comprehension part was significantly correlated with two of the health literacy screening questions. Our results indicate that the simplified Chinese version of the S-TOFHLA is a reliable measure of health literacy to be used in Mainland China.