Translation and Validation Study of the French Version of the eHealth Literacy Scale: Web-Based Survey on a Student Population

Abstract

Background: eHealth literacy is emerging as a crucial concept for promoting patient self-management in an overloaded hospital system. However, to the best of our knowledge, no tool currently exists to measure the level of eHealth literacy among French-speaking people. The eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS) is an easy-to-administer 8-item questionnaire (5-point Likert scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree) that has already been translated into many languages. Currently, it is the most cited questionnaire in the literature. Objective: The aim of this study was to translate eHEALS to French and validate the French version of eHEALS (F-eHEALS). Methods: The validation of the F-eHEALS scale followed the 5 steps of the transcultural validation method: double reverse translation, validation by a committee of experts (n=4), pretest measurement to check the clarity of the items (n=22), administration of the scale in French via a web-based quantitative study combined with two other questionnaires (Health Literacy Survey-Europe–16 and Patient Activation Measure–13; N=328 students), and finally test-retest (n=78) to check the temporal stability of the measurements obtained from the scale. Results: The results obtained for the measurement of factor structure, internal consistency, and temporal stability (intraclass correlation coefficient=0.84; 95% CI 0.76-0.9; F77,77=6.416; P