Development and Evaluation of Health Empowerment Scale for North Korean Women Defectors

Purpose: This study developed an instrument to evaluate the health empowerment of North Korean women refugees and examined its validity and reliability. Methods: Through literature review and focused group interviews, 66 preliminary items with three constructs, including perceived control, perceived competence, and goal internalization were selected based on Menon’s psychological health empowerment model. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 239 North Korean women refugees in the community from August 31 to September 4, 2020. Content, construct, convergent, and discriminative validity were evaluated. Cronbach’s α was used to evaluate the reliability of scale. Results: The final instrument consisted of 31 items with three factors that were identified through confirmatory factor analysis. The convergent validity showed that the correlation coefficient was.52 (p <.001), which confirmed the validity of the developed measurement tool. Cronbach’s α for all the items was.94, and Cronbach's α for the factors was.76~.91. Conclusion: This health empowerment scale has been developed to include aspects of health empowerment, provide a conceptual framework, and offer objective indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of a health education program.