Diabetes Mellitus Knowledge Test: development, psychometric evaluation, and establishing norms for Indian population

The cornerstone of diabetes management is self-management—a set of skilled behaviors to manage one’s own illness. Education for diabetes self-management is a vital component of overall management. Nevertheless, lack of knowledge concerning the various aspects of diabetes acts as one of the barriers to achieve optimal diabetes control. The objectives of the study were to develop a test to measure the knowledge of symptoms, causes and risk factors, complications, and management of type 2 diabetes and standardize the test initially by establishing the psychometric properties and norms on an Indian clinical sample. This new test named as Diabetes Mellitus Knowledge Test (DMKT) was developed through four phases—item writing, content validation, item analysis and reliability, and establishment of validity and development of norm—involving three clinical samples (n₁ = 10, n₂ = 212, n₃ = 268) basing on cross-sectional survey design. The DMKT consisted of 37 items having dichotomous response category that were distributed under four theoretical dimensions—symptoms (9 items), causes and risk factors (12 items), complications (11 items), and management (5 items). The reliability of the test was found to be .76. The convergent validity and norm were established. The implications and short-comings of the DMKT were discussed.