Validity, Reliability and Turkish Adaptation of Comprehensive Measure of Oral Health Knowledge Instrument and Determining the Level of Oral Health Knowledge in A Vocational School of Social Sciences

Oral health (OH) is an integral part of general health. One of the important research topics of public health has been the promotion and protection of OH. The aims of this methodological study are: Turkish adaptation of CMOHK which was developed for assessing oral health literacy (OHL), to determine the level of OHL in a vocational school, and to examine the relation between OHL and some sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics. The research group consisted of 314 students between the ages of 18-25 who accepted to participate in the study, and who were enrolled in Hacettepe University Vocational School of Social Sciences in 2018-2019 spring term and 307 questionnaires were included in the study. Data analysis were made by descriptive statistics, chi-square, Mann Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis tests. For adaptation and validity processes, linguistic validity; cognitive interviewing; content validity; construct validity analysis were conducted, the steps recommended by the International Test Committee and the World Health Organization were followed. For reliability analysis, internal consistency coefficents were calculated, coefficients for Cronbach's alpha was 0.70; Kuder-Richardson-20 (KR-20) was 0.71 and split-half was 0.71. Turkish-CMOHK (T-CMOHK) met validity and reliability criteria closing a gap in OHL area. The mean OHL score was 14.21 ± 3.49. 38.8% (n = 119) of the group's OHL was found to be poor, 33.9% (n = 104) was fair, and 27.4% (n = 84) was good. It is recommended to conduct further studies with T-CMOHK in larger groups with different socioeconomic characteristics to examine the relationship between OH behavior and OHL. Thus, it will be possible to strengthen the validity and reliability of the tool and to identify the patterns of OH which is an important health problem in our country.