A Scale Development for Visual Literacy on Health Students and Professionals

OBJECTIVE: Viewing that there is a lack of valid and reliable measures to assess visual literacy in clinical and healthcare settings, this study aimed to develop a visual literacy scale to assess health students’ and professionals’ visual literacy, by which teachers can further help them sharpen their visual literacy skills and sensitivity to let them reach effective communication in clinical and healthcare settings. METHODS: The scale was constructed according to Slavec and Drnovšek’s three-phase scale development process: theoretical significance and existence of the scale construct, representative data collection and appropriate data collection methods, and statistical analysis of data collection and statistical evidence of the scale construct. To investigate the psychometrical properties, the researchers first performed a pilot study on randomly selected 464 health students and professionals, using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with SPSS to derive the hidden factor structure, and then on randomly selected 303 participants, using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with AMOS to validate the derived factor structure. Internal consistency, convergent validities, discriminant validities, and goodness-of-fit indices were also examined in the study. RESULTS: After going through the EFA, 30 items in three factors were identified: “allegorical meaning” (12 items), “explicit meaning” (10 items), and “symbolic meaning” (8 items). The three factors explained 73.191 of the total variance. The CFA generated the same three factors and 22 items: “allegorical meaning” (12 items), “explicit meaning” (4 items), and “symbolic meaning” (6 items). The three factors accounted for 75.022% of variance. Both the EFA and CFA models demonstrated satisfactory goodness-of-fit and good convergent and discriminant validities. Regarding the reliabilities, the Cronbach’s alpha values in the EFA and CFA models were all above 0.90. CONCLUSION: The findings have demonstrated that the VLS-HSP can be a formal instrument to measure visual literacy on health students and professionals.