University Social Responsibility (USR<\/a>) initiatives have evolved from peripheral extracurricular activities into transformative pedagogical imperatives within contemporary higher education. Despite the proliferating implementation of service-learning curricula, conventional institutional evaluations have predominantly emphasized macro-level societal impacts and external stakeholder metrics, routinely overlooking the internal psychological, cognitive, and civic development of participating undergraduates. To bridge this critical measurement gap, the Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR (HPLS-USR)<\/strong> was engineered as a psychometrically validated self-report instrument designed to quantify the nuanced developmental trajectories of students engaged in community health promotion. Conceptualized across four interconnected dimensions\u2014Personal Growth<\/strong>, Responsibility of Citizenship<\/strong>, Social Interaction<\/strong>, and Intellectual Growth<\/strong>\u2014the scale operationalizes experiential civic engagement into an empirically tractable construct.<\/p>\n The final instrument comprises 22 items<\/strong> evaluated via a 5-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (never<\/em>) to 5 (always<\/em>). Initial psychometric validation was executed with a cohort of 200 Taiwanese undergraduate students (mean age = 19.27 years) actively enrolled in university-sponsored community health initiatives. Structural evaluation via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) demonstrated an exceptional sampling adequacy (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure = 0.908; statistically significant Bartlett\u2019s test of sphericity, p<\/em> < .001) and established a robust four-factor latent architecture accounting for 61.83% of the total cumulative variance<\/strong>, with salient item factor loadings spanning from 0.44 to 0.82. Internal consistency reliability analysis yielded an overall Cronbach\u2019s alpha<\/a> of 0.92<\/strong>, demonstrating remarkable measurement precision and minimal standard error across items. Criterion-related validity was corroborated against established metrics including the Service-Learning Experiences Scale and Service-Learning Growth Scale. The HPLS-USR represents an essential, evidence-based psychometric tool for higher education administrators, health psychologists, and curriculum designers dedicated to optimizing experiential service-learning pedagogies and cultivating civic-minded, socially responsive healthcare and allied health graduates<\/span>.<\/p>\n University Social Responsibility, Civic Literacy, Health Promotion Literacy, Experiential Learning, Psychometrics, Scale Validation, Service-Learning, Higher Education Assessment, Social Learning Theory, Student Civic Engagement, Personal Growth, Community Health Education<\/p>\n The Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR was developed by an interdisciplinary research team from Chung Shan Medical University<\/a> in Taichung, Taiwan:<\/p>\n Over the past two decades, universities across the globe have experienced an institutional paradigm shift, migrating from insular academic ecosystems toward models of active public engagement known as University Social Responsibility (USR<\/a>). Rooted in the broader mandate of sustainable development and community capacity building, USR programs mobilize faculty and students to address pressing societal challenges, ranging from rural public health disparities to environmental decay and marginalized community welfare. While institutional reporting mechanisms meticulously quantify the external deliverables of these ventures\u2014such as the enumeration of free health clinics delivered, community members screened, or economic investments deployed\u2014these metrics routinely neglect the primary pedagogical stakeholder: the undergraduate learner.<\/p>\n Historically, educational assessment within service-learning and USR frameworks has leaned heavily on subjective, unstandardized qualitative artifacts, such as unstructured reflective journals or perfunctory post-course satisfaction evaluations. Although valuable for idiographic insights, these anecdotal modalities fail to afford psychometric rigor, objective comparability, or statistical tracking of developmental shifts over time. Educators and psychological researchers lack standardized indices to evaluate whether community-based interventions actually precipitate fundamental cognitive restructuring, civic responsibility, and affective maturity within student cohorts.<\/p>\n The Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR (HPLS-USR)<\/strong> was engineered precisely to resolve this operational deficit. The scale serves as a standardized, multidimensional measurement framework tailored to capture the subjective, internal psychological and educational transformations experienced by students throughout experiential health-focused civic initiatives. Rather than treating civic literacy as an abstract philosophical ideal, the HPLS-USR operationalizes the construct into quantifiable developmental indicators.<\/p>\n Within clinical and empirical research, the HPLS-USR fulfills several paramount functions:<\/p>\n The HPLS-USR conceptualizes health promotion civic literacy<\/strong> not as an isolated, static repository of medical or biomedical facts, but as an integrative, dynamic psychological competence acquired through contextualized community action. Drawing from educational psychology, social psychology, and contemporary competency frameworks, the instrument models this literacy across four distinct yet mutually reinforcing latent dimensions: Personal Growth<\/strong>, Responsibility of Citizenship<\/strong>, Social Interaction<\/strong>, and Intellectual Growth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Personal Growth<\/em> dimension captures the psychological, emotional, and introspective maturation of the student. Experiential immersion into complex, resource-constrained community settings inevitably disrupts students\u2019 prior assumptions, generating cognitive disequilibrium and challenging their perceived comfort zones. This dimension operationalizes the development of heightened self-awareness, emotional resilience, self-efficacy, and adaptive coping mechanisms. Students scoring high on this subscale exhibit a progressive capacity to manage ambiguity, regulate distress when confronted with systemic suffering or health disparities, and cultivate an autonomous sense of purpose. An illustrative manifestation of this construct is an undergraduate\u2019s ability to honestly evaluate their personal biases, acknowledge emotional discomfort during clinical outreach, and convert those affective reactions into introspective self-improvement.<\/p>\n The Responsibility of Citizenship<\/em> dimension assesses the structural realignment of a student\u2019s ethical orientation\u2014transitioning from an individualistic, self-serving worldview toward an internalized collective consciousness and prosocial commitment. Rooted in psychological theories of moral development and altruism, this construct measures the degree to which an individual perceives community well-being as intrinsically tied to their own professional and personal obligations. It encapsulates civic mindedness, a dedication to health equity, and an enduring willingness to advocate for marginalized populations. In practice, elevated scores on this factor reflect a student\u2019s rejection of passive academic bystanderism in favor of an active, lifelong orientation toward public service, institutional advocacy, and systemic social reform.<\/p>\n The Social Interaction<\/em> subscale evaluates the interpersonal competencies, communicative adaptability, and socio-emotional intelligence necessary to navigate complex, heterogeneous human environments. Effective community health promotion requires students to move beyond academic jargon and engage with community stakeholders across stark socio-economic, generational, and cultural divides. This latent dimension operationalizes empathetic listening, cross-cultural competence, conflict resolution, interdisciplinary teamwork, and relationship-building agility. A student demonstrating robust social interaction literacy possesses the capacity to build reciprocal trust with skeptical community elders, collaborate cooperatively with peers from divergent healthcare disciplines, and communicate nuanced health guidance with cultural humility and communicative warmth.<\/p>\n The Intellectual Growth<\/em> dimension quantifies the cognitive expansion and epistemic maturity fostered through the practical application of didactic knowledge to real-world, ill-structured dilemmas. Didactic classroom learning typically presents clinical scenarios with predictable parameters and single correct answers. Conversely, authentic community health contexts present messy, multi-causal ecological challenges where social determinants of health clash with standard medical protocols. This dimension assesses higher-order problem-solving skills, critical thinking, creative cognitive synthesis, and practical knowledge transfer. A student manifesting elevated intellectual growth moves beyond rote memorization, demonstrating the intellectual agility to critically analyze community health barriers, synthesize multidisciplinary evidence, and tailor theoretical health promotion models to the idiosyncratic realities of an underserved community.<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture of the HPLS-USR synthesizes two foundational paradigms in psychological and educational science: John Dewey\u2019s philosophy of experiential learning<\/a> and Albert Bandura\u2019s Social Cognitive Theory<\/a>, with vital conceptual contributions from reflective practice theory and civic-minded graduate development frameworks.<\/p>\n At the core of the HPLS-USR lies John Dewey\u2019s (1933) foundational assertion that genuine learning does not occur through passive information absorption, but through an organic, reciprocal transaction between an active learner and an authentic environment. Dewey posited that educative experiences are characterized by continuity and interaction: novel experiences build upon prior cognitive schema, provoking a state of perplexity or cognitive dissonance that necessitates critical reflection. The HPLS-USR operationalizes this reflective process. When university students enter underserved community settings to promote health, their pre-existing academic frameworks are tested against real-world human suffering, resource deficits, and socio-cultural complexities.<\/p>\n Building on Dewey, Donald Sch\u00f6n\u2019s (1983) paradigms of reflection-in-action<\/em> and reflection-on-action<\/em> clarify how experiential practitioners develop professional mastery. Rather than mechanically executing static technical formulas, reflective practitioners dynamically adapt to ambiguous scenarios. The dimensions of Personal Growth<\/em> and Intellectual Growth<\/em> within the HPLS-USR explicitly capture this cognitive shift, measuring the degree to which community-based friction stimulates metacognitive recalibration, epistemic humility, and adaptive problem-solving capacities.<\/p>\n The sociological and interpersonal axes of the HPLS-USR are deeply grounded in Albert Bandura\u2019s (1977, 1986) Social Cognitive Theory, which posits that human psychological functioning operates through triadic reciprocal causation<\/em>\u2014the continuous, dynamic interaction between personal internal factors (cognitive, affective, and biological events), environmental influences, and behavioral patterns. Within USR initiatives, the community acts as a complex socio-cultural environment where observational learning, behavioral modeling, vicarious reinforcement, and direct social feedback converge.<\/p>\n Crucially, Bandura\u2019s construct of self-efficacy<\/em>\u2014an individual\u2019s conviction in their capability to organize and execute courses of action to manage prospective situations\u2014serves as the psychological engine driving student development. Through experiential community interaction, students accumulate enactive mastery experiences, observe peer and mentor models, and receive verbal persuasion from community members and faculty mentors. This experiential loop expands both specific task-oriented health promotion self-efficacy and broad civic self-efficacy, directly underpinning the scale’s Social Interaction<\/em> and Responsibility of Citizenship<\/em> dimensions. By observing the tangible impact of their actions on community well-being, students experience an internal shift in their perceived agency, transitioning from passive recipients of educational instruction to active agents of community health transformation.<\/p>\n Complementing Dewey and Bandura, the instrument integrates contemporary civic learning models, notably the Civic-Minded Graduate framework articulated by Steinberg, Hatcher, and Bringle (2011). This framework posits that the overarching goal of community-engaged higher education is the cultivation of a civic identity\u2014a developmental state wherein an individual\u2019s academic knowledge, technical skills, and professional identity are explicitly aligned with a commitment to public welfare. The HPLS-USR translates this theoretical trajectory into four quantifiable vectors, enabling psychometric measurement of how health professional students evolve into socially responsible practitioners.<\/p>\n The psychometric integrity and structural validity of the HPLS-USR were established through systematic empirical testing following classical test theory and best practices in educational measurement (DeVellis, 2012; Nunnally, 1978).<\/p>\n To verify the empirical viability of the correlation matrix for factor identification, the authors conducted formal data suitability diagnostics on the validation dataset (N<\/em> = 200). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy<\/strong> yielded an outstanding index of 0.908<\/strong>, substantially exceeding the recommended psychometric benchmark of 0.80 and confirming that the item pool exhibited shared common variance exceptionally suitable for factor extraction. Simultaneously, Bartlett\u2019s Test of Sphericity<\/strong> yielded a statistically significant result (p<\/em> < .001), rejecting the null hypothesis that the inter-item correlation matrix was an identity matrix and verifying that the linear dependencies among the items warranted structural latent modeling<\/span>.<\/p>\n The initial generation of the item pool was governed by an extensive synthesis of the USR, health literacy, and service-learning literature, supplemented by expert qualitative review. Content validity was evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel comprising specialists in occupational therapy, nursing, psychology, pharmacology, and medical chemistry, following standardized protocols for content quantification (Lynn, 1986; Zamanzadeh et al., 2015). Items judged to be ambiguous, conceptually overlapping, or displaying insufficient relevance to the target constructs were systematically revised or pruned.<\/p>\n Construct validity was empirically verified through exploratory factor analysis, which confirmed that all retained items aligned cleanly with their theorized conceptual dimensions without substantial anomalous cross-loadings. The extraction of four robust latent dimensions confirmed the multidimensional structure hypothesized by the developers, providing rigorous statistical proof that the HPLS-USR successfully operationalizes the multidimensional construct of health promotion civic literacy.<\/p>\n To establish criterion-related and convergent validity, the developers benchmarked the HPLS-USR against two gold-standard external psychometric instruments widely utilized in service-learning research: the Service-Learning Experiences Scale (SLES)<\/strong> and the Service-Learning Growth Scale (SLGS)<\/strong> (Chen, 2016). Bivariate correlation analyses revealed statistically significant positive correlations between total HPLS-USR scores and scores on both the SLES and SLGS, confirming that the scale accurately captures the intended psychological phenomena associated with experiential community service.<\/p>\n Furthermore, convergent validity was substantiated at the subscale level: items designated to each factor exhibited robust, statistically significant loadings on their respective latent variables, indicating that the indicators share a high proportion of common variance. Discriminant validity was supported by factor correlation matrices and inter-factor variance shares, demonstrating that while the four dimensions are moderately interrelated\u2014as theoretically expected within an overarching civic literacy construct\u2014each factor accounts for unique, non-redundant psychological variance.<\/p>\n A psychometric scale\u2019s utility in educational and clinical research depends strictly on its measurement precision, stability, and internal consistency. The HPLS-USR displays exceptional reliability across its constituent elements.<\/p>\n For the complete 22-item instrument<\/strong>, the overall internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach\u2019s alpha<\/a>) was established at 0.92<\/strong>. In psychometric theory, an alpha coefficient surpassing 0.90 reflects an outstanding degree of internal consistency, indicating that the item battery reliably measures the overarching latent construct while maintaining minimal standard error of measurement (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). This high reliability confirms that individual student scores obtained from the HPLS-USR reflect genuine differences in civic literacy and personal development rather than random measurement error or semantic ambiguity in item formulation.<\/p>\n At the dimensional level, each of the four extracted subscales demonstrated strong internal reliability coefficients, meeting or exceeding conventional psychometric thresholds for applied research (alphas generally > 0.80). Item-total correlations across the retained 22 items confirmed that every individual item contributed meaningfully to overall scale variance, with no item redundancy or deleterious suppression effects. The scale\u2019s high reliability guarantees that it can be confidently utilized in longitudinal cohort studies, pre-test\/post-test experimental designs, and comparative educational program evaluations<\/span>.<\/p>\n The latent dimensionality of the HPLS-USR was formally investigated utilizing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/strong> to identify the underlying structural framework of the instrument.<\/p>\n Factor extraction was conducted utilizing principal axis factoring and principal component techniques, guided by multiple extraction criteria: Kaiser\u2019s eigenvalue criterion (retaining factors with eigenvalues > 1.0), inspection of Cattell\u2019s scree plot, and Horn\u2019s parallel analysis (Horn, 1965). The EFA cleanly extracted a four-factor solution<\/strong> that fully mirrored the conceptual framework designed by the authors<\/span>.<\/p>\n The extracted four-factor model accounted for a substantial 61.83% of the total cumulative variance<\/strong> across the 22 items. In behavioral, educational, and psychological measurement, an explained variance exceeding 60% is universally regarded as a rigorous threshold indicating that the latent dimensions adequately capture the construct space. Individual item factor loadings across the four domains ranged from 0.44 to 0.82<\/strong>, satisfying the conservative psychometric threshold (loading > 0.40) for meaningful indicator retention (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007; DeVellis, 2012)<\/span>.<\/p>\n The clean factor patterns, absence of severe cross-loadings, and high explanatory variance confirm that the HPLS-USR possesses an exceptionally stable and interpretable internal structure, validating its deployment either as a composite global score or as a four-dimensional developmental profile.<\/p>\n The practical administration parameters and structural specifications of the Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR are summarized below:<\/p>\n The Health Promotion Literacy-based Scale for students in USR was formally published in 2022<\/strong> by Hung, Huang, Wang, Li, and Ho in the peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health<\/em> (IJERPH). The validation study is accessible under an open-access licensing framework (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, CC BY 4.0<\/a>).<\/p>\n While the conceptual framework, psychometric metrics, and validation statistics are published openly, the complete proprietary item inventory remains under the copyright of the primary research team at Chung Shan Medical University. Non-commercial educational researchers and institutional analysts seeking to utilize, translate, or adapt the complete 22-item instrument for empirical investigations are required to obtain permission from the corresponding author:<\/p>\n \n Chia-Hui Hung<\/strong>Keywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Personal Growth<\/h3>\n
2. Responsibility of Citizenship<\/h3>\n
3. Social Interaction<\/h3>\n
4. Intellectual Growth<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Dewey’s Experiential Learning and Reflective Thinking<\/h3>\n
Bandura\u2019s Social Cognitive and Social Learning Theory<\/h3>\n
The Civic-Minded Professional Framework<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Sampling Adequacy and Structural Suitability<\/h3>\n
Content and Construct Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion-Related, Convergent, and Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Extraction Methodology and Criteria<\/h3>\n
Variance Explanation and Factor Loadings<\/h3>\n
Factor Structure Overview<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
\n Department of Occupational Therapy, Chung Shan Medical University
\n Taichung 40201, Taiwan
\n Email: chhung@csmu.edu.tw<\/a>\n<\/p>\nReferences<\/h2>\n
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Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n