Development and validation of patient diabetes knowledge questionnaire (PDKQ)

Abstract

Background

Evaluation of diabetes knowledge plays a pivotal role in identifying and addressing patients’ knowledge gaps. The implementation of a standardized diabetes knowledge assessment tool is important to ensure consistent scoring and facilitating the development of effective and standardized education programs.

Aim

To develop and validate a patient diabetes knowledge questionnaire (PDKQ) to assess knowledge of diabetes mellitus patients.

Methods

The development of the PDKQ questionnaire involved three phases: item development, content validation, and reliability testing. In the item development phase, the initial draft of the PDKQ, comprising a multiple-choice answer questionnaire was developed. The content validation phase comprised two stages. Firstly, ten experts participated in the expert validation process, followed by face validation involving six patients. In the final phase, test–retest analysis was performed among diabetes mellitus patients to assess reliability.

Results

The first draft of PDKQ consisted of 11 patient characteristics items and 37 items of multiple choices questions. During the expert validation, three items were eliminated due to low clarity, and an additional six items were removed as they were deemed irrelevant or unimportant. During the face validation, three patients' characteristic items and eight multiple-choice questions were excluded due to a content validity index of less than 0.83. In the test–retest phase, 36 subjects responded to 8 items pertaining to patients' characteristics and 20 multiple-choice questions. The test–retest analysis yielded an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.88, indicating good reliability.

Conclusion

The 20-item PDKQ is a reliable and robust tool in assessing the knowledge of diabetes mellitus patients in Malaysia. Its implementation allows standardized assessment of diabetic patients' knowledge levels, enabling targeted interventions to empower patients and optimize diabetes care practices.

Keywords:

• Patient knowledge
• Diabetes mellitus
• Questionnaire
• Development
• Validation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Director General of Health, Ministry of Health Malaysia for the approval to publish this article. Appreciation extended to consultant endocrinologists, family medicine specialists and pharmacists from Diabetes Medication Therapy Adherence Clinic for their contribution in content validation.

Author contributions

PCL, RR, YLL and HZ contributed to the study conception, design, material preparation and analysis. All authors contributed equally to this work including data collection, writing and review of manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

There is no funding for this research.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to confidentiality of patients, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This research is registered in the National Medical Research Register, Malaysia (No. NMRR-20-1844-55868) and approved by the Medical Research Ethics Committee, Malaysia. All participants were provided information sheet and written informed consent was obtained. All research procedures were conducted according to ICH-GCP and other regulatory requirements.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

All authors declare to have no competing interest.

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