Development of a Digital Sensitivity Scale for Assessing Adaptability to Mental Health Care
Apr 23, 2025
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Recently, in the field of mental health, treatment methods using digital technologies such as mental health apps and digital-based psychotherapy are gradually expanding to maintain continuity of treatment and management and increase treatment compliance.
In order to effectively utilize these digital healthcare services, the ability of patients to actively participate, such as understanding and utilizing information in a digital environment, that is, digital sensitivity, is important. This is because low digital sensitivity poses a risk of deteriorating the effectiveness of treatment.
The research team conducted the study based on the limitation that the concept of 'digital literacy' covered by existing studies focused only on the individual's technical capabilities and did not consider psychological factors such as confidence or anxiety in using technology. In this study, we proposed a new scale to comprehensively evaluate digital literacy and efficacy. This scale was named 'Yongin Severance Digital Sensitivity Scale (YI-DSS)' to reflect the hospital's direction of digital innovation.
A total of 986 adults considering demographic composition participated in the study in the form of an online survey. The initial questions of YI-DSS were collected through a literature review and supplemented by reflecting the opinions of mental health and digital health experts to ensure content validity.
A scale consisting of 14 digital literacy items and 6 digital efficacy items verified how valid the structure was using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). EFA and CFA are important statistical techniques to verify the validity of survey tools.
As a result of the analysis, the digital literacy item showed a solid structure consisting of four factors: ▲ digital utilization ▲ digital communication ▲ critical thinking ▲ digital ethics, and the digital efficacy item ▲ digital confidence ▲ digital anxiety. In addition, it was confirmed that YI-DSS has high explanatory power in measuring digital literacy and efficacy, and has a high correlation with existing digital literacy scales.
Professor Park Jin-young said, "As digital transformation moves spread to medical environments such as telemedicine and digital treatments, it is important to comprehensively evaluate patients' digital adaptability, such as technical and psychological capabilities, to increase treatment effectiveness and compliance. We hope that the newly developed evaluation scale will bridge the digital gap between generations in the treatment environment and create a digital treatment environment tailored to patients."
The findings were recently published in the international journal 『Journal of Medical Internet Research』.
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This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
