Psychometric validation of the death literacy index and benchmarking of death literacy level in a representative uk population sample
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Death literacy includes the knowledge and skills that people need to gain access to, understand, and make informed choices about end of life and death care options. The Death Literacy Index (DLI) can be used to determine levels of death literacy across multiple contexts, including at a community/national level, and to evaluate the outcome of public health interventions. As the first measure of death literacy, the DLI has potential to significantly advance public health approaches to palliative care. The current study aimed to provide the first assessment of the psychometric properties of the DLI in the UK, alongside population-level benchmarks. METHODS: A large nationally representative sample of 399 participants, stratified by age, gender and ethnicity, were prospectively recruited via an online panel. The factor structure of the 29-item DLI was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis. Internal consistency of subscales was assessed alongside interpretability. Hypothesised associations with theoretically related/unrelated constructs were examined to assess convergent and discriminant validity. Descriptive statistics were used to provide scaled mean scores on the DLI. RESULTS: Confirmatory factor analysis supported the original higher-order 8 factor structure, with the best fitting model including one substituted item developed specifically for UK respondents. The subscales reported high internal consistency. Good convergent and discriminant validity was evidenced in relation to objective knowledge of the death system, death competency, actions relating to death and dying in the community and loneliness. Good known-groups validity was achieved with respondents with professional/lived experience of end-of-life care reporting higher levels of death literacy. There was little socio-demographic variability in DLI scores. Scaled population-level mean scores were near the mid-point of DLI subscale/total, with comparatively high levels of experiential knowledge and the ability to talk about death and dying. CONCLUSIONS: Psychometric evaluations suggest the DLI is a reliable and valid measure of death literacy for use in the UK, with population level benchmarks suggesting the UK population could strengthen capacity in factual knowledge and accessing help. International validation of the DLI represents a significant advancement in outcome measurement for public health approaches to palliative care. PRE-REGISTRATION: https://osf.io/fwxkh/.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it