European Health Literacy Survey (HLS-EU-Q16)
Psychology: Health & SleepReliability: alpha 0.893 sample items
About this scale
A 16-item measure of general health literacy across four cognitive domains (access, understand, appraise, apply) and three life areas (healthcare, disease prevention, health promotion).
Sample item(s)
“How easy is it to find information about how to manage mental health problems?”
“How easy is it to understand information from your doctor?”
“How easy is it to judge if information about a health risk in the media is reliable?”
Reliability
Reported internal consistency: alpha 0.89. As a rule of thumb, Cronbach’s α ≥ .70 is considered acceptable, ≥ .80 good, and ≥ .90 excellent for established measures.
Notes
Useful in occupational-health and HRM research.
Source & citation
Sørensen, K., Pelikan, J. M., Röthlin, F., Ganahl, K., Slonska, Z., Doyle, G., Fullam, J., Kondilis, B., Agrafiotis, D., Uiters, E., Falcon, M., Mensing, M., Tchamov, K., van den Broucke, S., & Brand, H. (2015): Health literacy in Europe: Comparative results of the European health literacy survey (HLS-EU). European Journal of Public Health, Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 1053–1058.
Source. Scale details are summarised from the publication cited above. Always consult the original source for the full item set, scoring, and permission to use.
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