eHealth Literacy Scale

eHEALS

health sciencespsychologyFree for research use

Permission: Free for research use. Free for non-commercial academic research, with no license fee. Cite the original publication.

An 8-item measure of perceived ability to find, evaluate, and use online health information.

Items

Response format

5-point Likert scale

Version

Original 8-item eHEALS

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Perceived eHealth literacy was measured with the 8-item eHEALS (Norman & Skinner, 2006), which showed good internal consistency in the original youth sample (α = .88).

Citing this in a methods section? This scale spans more than one discipline, so the style depends on where you publish. See the APA 7 or Vancouver guides, or compare all six citation styles.

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Reliability & validation

Notes

The original principal-components analysis yielded one factor explaining 56% of variance.

Validation population

Canadian adolescents and young adults aged 13-21 (Norman & Skinner, 2006)

Test–retest

0.40-0.68 across follow-ups to 6 months

Cronbach's α

0.88

Response anchors

Strongly disagree · Disagree · Undecided · Agree · Strongly agree

Known limitations

eHEALS measures perceived, not demonstrated, digital-health skill and was developed before today's mobile, social, and AI-mediated information environment. The original sample was predominantly adolescent.

Original citation

Norman, C. D., & Skinner, H. A. (2006). eHEALS: The eHealth Literacy Scale. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 8(4), e27.

https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.8.4.e27

Questions researchers ask

What does the eHEALS measure?

An 8-item measure of perceived ability to find, evaluate, and use online health information.

How many items does the eHEALS have?

The eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS) has 8 items.

Is the eHEALS free to use?

The eHEALS is free to use for non-commercial academic research. You don't need to pay a license fee, but you should always cite the original publication.

Is the eHEALS reliable?

Validation studies report Cronbach's α of 0.88, test–retest reliability of 0.40-0.68 across follow-ups to 6 months. See the reliability section for the population studied and full statistics.

Who developed the eHEALS, and how do I cite it?

Norman, C. D., & Skinner, H. A. (2006). eHEALS: The eHealth Literacy Scale. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 8(4), e27. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.8.4.e27

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Library entry verified August 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.