Abstract

Objective: The research was carried out to develop a "Perception of Health News Scale" to measure the behavior towards the demand for health services at the individual level appropriate for Turkish culture.

Method: This methodological study was conducted between October 2017 and December 2017 with 296 students studying at the health sciences faculty of a foundation university located in Europe near Istanbul. The data were obtained with a personal information form and a 36-item health news perception scale scale. For the draft Scale; peer review, surface validity, expert evaluation, content validity, correlation between materials for internal consistency / reliability, calculation of Cronbach Alpha values, explanatory factor analysis for construct validity.

Result: Scope validity of the scale as a result of the expert evaluation is 0.87. The correlation values between the scales were r = 0.42 - 0.71 and is the Cronbach Alpha value = 0.84. Kaiser-Meyer Olkin value of scale = 0.80, Bartlett test χ2 = 2356,677; p = 0.000, anti-image r values = 0.70-0.89 found between. The items with a factor load value of less than 0.50 were extracted from the scale and it was found that the scale had 26 items and the total variance explained was 53.3% and it was composed of 5 sub factors such as commercial anxiety and advertisement, adverse effect on health behavior, treatment desire and abuse and trust in health journalism.

Conclusion: This scale is a reliable and valid measurement tool for determining the perception of individuals' health news.