Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To perform cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Health Literacy Dental scale (HeLD) in Brazilian adults. METHODS: The HeLD instrument was translated and cross-culturally adapted to the Brazilian Portuguese language to create longer (HeLD-29) and shorter (HeLD-14) versions. The reliability and validity of these versions were assessed in a sample of 603 adults living near six primary care units in the city of Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil. RESULTS: Both versions of HeLD demonstrated high internal reliability, acceptable convergent validity and discriminant validity. However, the confirmatory factor analysis showed that only HeLD-14 demonstrated satisfactory goodness of fit. There were associations between HeLD-14 scores and social demographic characteristics, general and oral health and oral health-related behaviours. Higher scores were observed for the total HeLD-14 and/or individual components of HeLD-14 among women, ethnic white subjects, those with high educational attainment, those with higher income, those reporting toothbrushing twice or more daily, regular dental attenders, those who usually attended for dental care for a check-up, those with excellent or very good self-ratings of general health, those with excellent or very good self-ratings of oral health, and those without tooth extraction and oral health impact. CONCLUSION: The Brazilian version of HeLD-14 was demonstrated to be a reliable and valid instrument for measuring broad aspects of oral health literacy in the adult Brazilian population.