s-MHLS心理計量特性分析結果

       A total of 87 (54% male, 46% female) patients with stroke joined in this study. The average age of participants was 57 years. The majority of participants were outpatients, had 10 to 16 years of formal schooling (senior high to college) and lived in urbanized cities. Other demographic characteristics of participants were shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographic characteristics of participants (n=87)

variable	mean (SD)	n (%)
gender
male		47 (54%)
female		40 (46%)
age	57.37 (15.13)
years of formal education
1-6		20 (22%)
7-12		12 (14%)
13-16		30 (35%)
≥17		3 (3%)
occupation
retired		37 (43%)
unemployed		32 (37%)
labor		15 (17%)
manager		3 (3%)
urbanization level of residence
moderate to highly urbanized cities		64 (74%)
developing cities		12 (14%)
rural areas		7 (8%)
sources of patients
outpatients		77 (88%)
inpatients		10 (12%)
months after stroke	21.30 (25.84)
affected side
left		54 (62%)
right		29 (33%)
others		4 (5%)
health status
modified Rankin Scale	2.49 (1.06)
Self-Rated Health Status	61.96 (17.04)
Public Stroke Knowledge Quiz	13.33 (3.11)
s-MHLS	8.06 (2.84)

The mean s-MHLS score was 8.06 in the study sample (range, 0 to 11), which was relatively lower than the mean s-MHLS score of healthy adults (i.e., 9.01) in previous survey (Lee, Tsai, Tsai, & Kuo, 2012). Figure 1 shows that the distributions of the s-MHLS scores had significant skewness (i.e., -0.78). We found that more than 25% patients got the highest score of the s-MHLS, which demonstrated that the s-MHLS had a notable ceiling effect.

Figure 1. Histogram with normal curve superimposed over the distribution of total scores of the short-form Mandarin Health Literacy Scale (s-MHLS).

The s-MHLS displayed high internal consistency, α=0.82. The s-MHLS score was highly correlated with the Public stroke knowledge quiz score (r=0.62, p<0.001), indicating high convergent validity. However, the correlation between the s-MHLS score and the self-rated health status was not significant (r=0.11, p=0.13). In terms of the discriminative validity (Table 2), the s-MHLS scores exhibited significant differences between two age groups (i.e., middle-aged and elder patients) (p<0.001). The s-MHLS scores also showed significant between two educational levels (i.e., below junior high and above senior high) (p=0.001). It's worth noting that there was no significant difference between male and female in terms of the s-MHLS mean score.

Table 2. Results of discriminative validity

criterion	mean (SD)	t	p
gender
Male (n=47)	8.23 (2.77)	0.63	0.53
Female (n=40)	7.85 (2.94)
age (years)
≤ 59 (n=45)	9.18 (1.97)	4.16	<0.001‡
≥ 60 (n=42)	6.86 (3.14)
years of formal education
≤ 9 (n=31)	6.84 (2.90)	3.55	0.001
≥ 10 (n=53)	8.94 (2.45)