Development and validation of the clinical information literacy questionnaire

Clinical Information Literacy (CIL) seems to be a prerequisite for physicians to implement Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) effectively. This study endeavors to develop and validate a CIL questionnaire for medical residents of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences.

This study employs sequential-exploratory mixed methods in 2019. The participants were 200 medical residents in different specialties; they are selected through the convenience sampling method. In the first (qualitative) phase, an early CIL questionnaire was designed by reviewing literature and performing complementary interviews with health professionals. In the second (validation) phase, the questionnaire's face validity and content validity were confirmed. In the third (quantitative) phase, the construct validity was examined via Item-Response Theory (IRT) model, and the factor loading was computed. The gathered data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, two-way ANOVA, as well as two-parameter IRT model in R software.

In the qualitative phase, the concept of CIL is initially described in seven main categories and 22 subcategories, and the items were formulated. An initial 125-item questionnaire was analyzed by the research team, leading to a 43-item. Through the content validity and face validity examination, we removed 11 and 4 items in the Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and Content Validity Index (CVI), respectively. Throughout the face validity analysis, none of the items were removed. According to the construct validity results, difficulty coefficient, discriminant coefficient, and factor loading were confirmed, most of the other questions achieved a proper factor loading value that is higher than 0.30, and a value of 0.66 was achieved for the reliability via the Kuder-Richardson method. Ultimately, the real-assessment 28-item CIL questionnaire was developed with four components.

The CIL questionnaire could be employed to examine the actual CIL basic knowledge. Because of using the real-assessment approach rather than self-assessment in the design, it can be claimed that this instrument can provide a more accurate assessment of the information literacy status of medical residents. This valid questionnaire is used to measure and train the skills needed by healthcare professionals in the effective implementation of EBM.