Session Information
08 SES 07, Health Literacy: Conceptual, Empirical and Ethical Reflections
Paper Session
Contribution
According to World Health Organization’s report (Kickbusch et al., 2013) there is a health literacy (HL) crisis in Europe and beyond due to mismatch between the competence capital of people and the increasingly complex demands to take care of one’s health. A recent study reported that 10% of people in Europe have insufficient and 50 % have limited competencies to promote and maintain health (i.e. HL) (Sørensen et al., 2015). Inadequate HL has consequences both at an individual and societal level. Also, it has been reported to be an independent risk factor for poor health outcomes (Volandes & Paashe-Orlow, 2007). Also, it has been linked to problems in interpretation of health-related information, more hospitalization, incorrect use of medicines, poorer health status, increased mortality (Berkman et al., 2011) and higher health care costs for the society (Howard, 2005).
Many health behaviors and a foundation for health and wellbeing is built during childhood. An increase in the complexity of the challenges in taking care of health is a particularly important issue for children and adolescents today. Present environment exposes children and adolescents to many unhealthy behaviors like physical inactivity (Davison & Lawson, 2006) or excessive gain of energy (Patrick & Nicklas, 2005), at the same time when they are getting more autonomous in taking care of their health. Also, Internet and other media expose children with an increasing amounts of knowledge of varying quality (Mackey et al. 2014), and offer various media platforms for learning of health issues (Begoray et al., 2015). School health education offers an important context for developing pupils’ competencies to face with these demands.
Various measures of HL move from narrow focus on functional skills toward broader competence operationalization. Also, variations do exist in whether to measure subjective (i.e. self-reported, perceived) or objective (performance-based) HL. There is a tendency to value more on objective measures (e.g. McCormack et al., 2013). However, current subjective measures have succeeded in measuring comprehensive, that is, multidimensional HL which is still not the case with many objective tests (Altin et al., 2014). Also, over three decades an extensive amount of research has shown a clear link between self-efficacy and health behaviour (Conner & Norman, 2005). According to Bandura (2004) “efficacy beliefs influence goals and aspirations” and “the stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the higher the goals people set for themselves and the firmer their commitment to them”, which indicate a need to study how people perceive their competence regarding health-related issues.
Despite of the increasing interest in measuring HL, there is lack of studies focusing on children’s and adolescents’ subjective HL at the population-level (Ormshaw et al., 2013), as are the papers reporting how perceived HL is linked to health behavior and perceived health. The aim of this research is to study the association between subjective HL and health behaviour (e.g. smoking and physical activity) and perceived health (self-rated health) among Finnish 13- and 15- years-old pupils.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Altin, S. V., Finke, I., Kautz-Freimuth, S., & Stock, S. (2014). The evolution of health literacy assessment tools: a systematic review. BMC public health, 14(1), 1207. Bandura, A. (2004). Health promotion by social cognitive means. Health education & behavior, 31(2), 143-164. Begoray, D. L., Banister, E. M., Wharf Higgins, J., & Wilmot, R. (2015). Puppets on a string? How young adolescents explore gender and health in advertising. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 6(3), 57-64. Berkman, N. D., Sheridan, S. L., Donahue, K. E., Halpern, D. J., & Crotty, K. (2011). Low health literacy and health outcomes: an updated systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine, 155(2), 97—107. Conner, M., & Norman, P. (2005). Predicting health behaviour. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Davison, K. K., & Lawson, C. T. (2006). Do attributes in the physical environment influence children's physical activity? A review of the literature. International journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity, 3(1), 19. Howard, D. H., Gazmararian, J. & Parker, R. M. (2005). The impact of low health literacy on the medical costs of medicare managed care enrollees. The American journal of medicine, 118(4), 371—377. Kickbusch, l., Pelikan, J.M., Apfel, F., & Tsouros, A.D. (2013). Health literacy: The solid facts. Copenhagen: World Health Organization. Mackey, T. K., Liang, B. A., Kohler, J. C., & Attaran, A. (2014). Health domains for sale: the need for global health internet governance. Journal of medical Internet research, 16(3), e62. McCormack, L., Haun, J., Sørensen, K., & Valerio, M. (2013). Recommendations for advancing health literacy measurement. Journal of health communication, 18(sup1), 9-14. Ormshaw, M., Paakkari, L., & Kannas L. (2013). Measuring child and adolescent health literacy: a systematic review. Health Education, 113(5), 433—455. Patrick, H., & Nicklas, T. A. (2005). A review of family and social determinants of children’s eating patterns and diet quality. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 24(2), 83-92. Sørensen, K., Pelikan, J. M., Röthlin, F., Ganahl, K., Slonska, Z., Doyle, G., ... & Falcon, M. (2015). Health literacy in Europe: comparative results of the European health literacy survey (HLS-EU). The European Journal of Public Health, ckv043. Volandes, A. E. & Paasche-Orlow, M. K. (2007). Health literacy, health inequality and a just healthcare system. The American Journal of Bioethics, 7(11), 5—10.
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