Validity and reliability of a Turkish version of the human papillomavirus knowledge scale: a methodological study

The aim of the study was to test validity and reliability of the Human Papilloma Virus Knowledge Scale (HPV-KS) in Turkish.

The methodological study was conducted with 920 participants at a training and research hospital in Ankara, Turkey, between February and May 2019. The data collection form consisted of descriptive characteristics of the participants and HPV-KS. Guidelines for the Process of Cross-Cultural Adaptation of Self-Reported Measures were followed for the language and cultural adaptation of the scale. Content validity, exploratory, and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to test the validity of the scale. The scale's reliability was assessed using the item-total correlation, Cronbach's alpha, and test-retest analysis.

In line with the experts' suggestions, two item were excluded from the scale. The scale content validity index was found to be 0.96. The exploratory factor analysis determined the four subscales of the scale with 33-items. The explained variance was found to be 64.56%. In the confirmatory factor analysis, all the goodness of fit indexes had acceptable values. The item-total correlations determined that each item was positively correlated with the total scale ranging from 0.53 to 0.80. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient calculated for the overall scale was 0.96. It was found that there was a statistically significant positive relationship between test and retest (r=0.166; p=0.05).

The scale was shown to be a valid and reliable standard measurement that can be used to accurately evaluate the efficacy of health education provided by healthcare professionals.