Internal Consistency Reliability of the Bahasa Malaysia Version of Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool

Introduction The Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) is an instrument to assess the understandability and actionability of patient education materials (PEMs). It has two versions: PEMAT-P for printable materials and PEMAT-A/V for audio-visual materials. This study aimed to determine internal consistency reliability of the Bahasa Malaysia version of PEMAT, designated as PEMAT-P(M) and PEMAT-A/V(M).

Methodology This was a cross-sectional study involving nine health care workers from various health disciplines involved in provision of patient education at the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH) health facilities as raters to evaluate 13 printable PEMs and 13 audio-visual PEMs using PEMAT-P(M) and PEMAT-A/V(M) respectively. Cronbach's alpha coefficient (α) was used to determine PEMAT(M)'s internal consistency reliability.

Results Internal consistency reliability of PEMAT(M) domains was high (α > 0.70) for most raters, except actionability domain for several raters. The corrected item-total correlations (CITC) were at least 0.20 for most items. Deletion of any item from PEMAT-P(M) and PEMAT-A/V(M) did not cause substantial increase of α value of most items. Therefore, removal of any item from PEMAT-P(M) and PEMAT-A/V(M) was not indicated.

Discussion / Conclusion Lower α values (< 0.70) actionability domain could be attributed to low number of actionability items in PEMAT-P(M) (7 items) and PEMAT-A/V(M) (4 items). Positive CITC of at least 0.20 indicated good correlation with other items in their respective domain, and most items correlated well with the total score and the scale overall. In conclusion, PEMAT-P(M) and PEMAT-A/V(M) demonstrated acceptable internal consistency reliability for measuring understandability and actionability of PEMs developed in Bahasa Malaysia.

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