Table of Contents
Abstract
University Social Responsibility (USR) initiatives have become a cornerstone of modern higher education, shifting the academic focus from isolated ivory towers to active community engagement. While the societal benefits of these programs are frequently documented, evaluating the internal psychological and educational transformations within the participating students remains a complex challenge. To address this, researchers developed the Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR (HPLS-USR). This instrument is designed to capture the nuanced development of Civic Literacy, personal growth, and social awareness that students undergo when they step out of the classroom and into community service roles.
By operationalizing the abstract concept of 'Civic Literacy' into measurable dimensions, the HPLS-USR provides educators and psychometricians with a robust tool to quantify the Experiential Learning process. The scale moves beyond simple satisfaction metrics, probing deeply into how students internalize their social responsibilities, interact with diverse populations, and grow intellectually. For institutions committed to fostering well-rounded, socially conscious graduates, this scale offers a critical mechanism for evaluating and refining their USR curricula.
📊 Psychometric Scorecard
22
Multidimensional
0.92
📍 Taiwan
Authors
Purpose
Historically, the evaluation of university community programs has skewed heavily toward external outcomes, such as the economic or health benefits delivered to a specific neighborhood. However, this outward focus neglects a primary stakeholder in the educational ecosystem: the student. The HPLS-USR was engineered to fill this critical measurement gap by providing a standardized, psychometrically validated method for assessing the internal, cognitive, and attitudinal shifts that occur within students during USR participation.
For researchers and educational psychologists, this scale is invaluable because it translates theoretical pedagogical goals into empirical data. Instead of relying on anecdotal reflections or generic course evaluations, administrators can use the HPLS-USR to systematically measure whether a specific community-based curriculum is actually fostering the intended civic mindedness and intellectual maturity. This allows for evidence-based curriculum design and ensures that universities are meeting their dual mandate of community service and student development.
Construct
The psychological architecture of the HPLS-USR is deeply rooted in Social Learning Theory and Dewey's philosophy of Experiential Learning. The core premise is that Civic Literacy is not a static trait acquired through passive listening, but a dynamic construct forged through active social interaction, observation, and critical reflection. The scale conceptualizes this literacy as a multidimensional framework encompassing four distinct but interrelated domains: personal growth, responsibility of citizenship, social interaction, and intellectual growth.
Personal growth captures the student's evolving self-awareness and emotional resilience when faced with real-world challenges. The responsibility of citizenship dimension measures the internalization of civic duties and the shift from a self-centric worldview to a community-oriented one. Social interaction evaluates the student's capacity to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics and collaborate across diverse groups. Finally, intellectual growth assesses the cognitive leaps made when students apply theoretical classroom knowledge to solve unstructured, practical problems in the community. Together, these factors form a comprehensive profile of a socially responsible learner.
Validity
To establish the structural integrity of the HPLS-USR, the developers subjected the initial item pool to rigorous psychometric scrutiny. The sampling adequacy was confirmed to be excellent, with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) index of 0.908, indicating that the data was highly suitable for structure detection. Furthermore, Bartlett's Test of Sphericity yielded a highly significant result, assuring researchers that the correlation matrix was not an identity matrix and that the variables were adequately related for factor extraction.
Beyond structural checks, the researchers also evaluated criterion-related validity by comparing the HPLS-USR against established measures like the Service-Learning Experiences Scale and the Service-Learning Growth Scale. By demonstrating that the new scale aligns theoretically and statistically with these existing benchmarks, the developers provided strong evidence that the HPLS-USR accurately captures the intended construct of experiential civic learning.
Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations
| Reference Instrument | Correlation Coefficient (r) |
|---|---|
| Service-Learning Experiences Scale (SLES) | |
| Service-Learning Growth Scale (SLGS) |
Reliability
In psychometric assessment, a scale's utility is heavily dependent on its internal consistency, and the HPLS-USR demonstrates exceptional reliability in this regard. The final 22-item instrument achieved an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.92. In the context of scale development, an alpha value exceeding 0.90 indicates a very high degree of interrelatedness among the items, suggesting that they are consistently measuring the same underlying construct of USR literacy.
For graduate students and researchers utilizing this tool, this high reliability coefficient means that the scale will yield stable and consistent scores across different cohorts of students. It minimizes measurement error, allowing educators to be confident that the variations in scores genuinely reflect differences in students' Civic Literacy and personal growth, rather than statistical noise or ambiguous item wording.
Factor Analysis
The dimensionality of the HPLS-USR was explored using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), a standard and robust approach when defining the underlying structure of a newly developed instrument. The EFA successfully distilled the item pool into a clean, interpretable four-factor model. These four factors—personal growth, citizenship responsibility, social interaction, and intellectual growth—collectively accounted for a substantial 61.83% of the total variance in the scale, which is a strong explanatory threshold for psychological and educational measures.
The item-level performance was equally robust, with individual factor loadings ranging from 0.44 to 0.82. These loadings indicate that each of the 22 retained items contributes meaningfully to its respective latent factor without excessive cross-loading. This clean factor structure not only validates the theoretical framework proposed by the authors but also ensures that the subscales can be used independently or aggregately to provide a granular view of a student's developmental trajectory.
Subscales
| Subscale | Items | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Personal Growth | Measures the student's evolving self-awareness, emotional resilience, and individual development resulting from community engagement. | |
| Responsibility of Citizenship | Assesses the internalization of civic duties, altruism, and the shift toward a community-oriented mindset. | |
| Social Interaction | Evaluates the capacity to navigate interpersonal dynamics, collaborate with diverse groups, and build relationships in a social context. | |
| Intellectual Growth | Captures the cognitive development and problem-solving skills gained by applying academic knowledge to real-world community issues. |
Instrument
| Test Type | Self-report questionnaire |
| Format | 22 items, 5-point Likert scale (1 = never to 5 = always) |
| Scoring | Total score is calculated by summing all items. Higher scores indicate greater literacy development and more positive reflections on the USR experience. |
| Language | Chinese |
| Population | College students |
| Age Group | Mean age 19.27 |
| Administration | Self-administered |
Scoring & Interpretation Guidelines
| Scoring Instructions | Scores are summed across all 22 items. A higher total score reflects a higher level of Civic Literacy and a more positive developmental experience within the USR curriculum. |
Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR Items
Items are currently not available
The individual items of this scale are not publicly available. Researchers interested in using this instrument should contact the original authors directly to request the scale materials.
Sample
The validation sample consisted of 200 undergraduate students (average age 19.27 years) who had participated in University Social Responsibility programs. Data was collected following a 5:1 participant-to-item ratio guideline for psychometric testing.
Cite This Paper
Chia-Hui Hung, Cheng-Yi Huang, Yu-Ming Wang, Yi-Ching Li, Yung-Chuan Ho (2022). Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR. International journal of environmental research and public health. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19084545
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Cite this article
Mohammed looti (2026). Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/health-promotion-literacy-based-scale-for-students-in-usr/
Mohammed looti. "Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 14 Aug. 2026, https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/health-promotion-literacy-based-scale-for-students-in-usr/.
Mohammed looti. "Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 2026. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/health-promotion-literacy-based-scale-for-students-in-usr/.
Mohammed looti (2026) 'Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR', PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Available at: https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/health-promotion-literacy-based-scale-for-students-in-usr/.
[1] Mohammed looti, "Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR," PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, vol. X, no. Y, ص Z-Z, August, 2026.
Mohammed looti. Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. 2026;vol(issue):pages.