Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models
By K. Sørensen, S. van den Broucke, James Fullam, G. Doyle, J. Pelikan, Z. Słońska, H. Brand. BMC Public Health, 2012
5,138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundHealth literacy concerns the knowledge and competences of persons to meet the complex demands of health in modern society. Although its importance is increasingly recognised, there is no consensus about the definition of health literacy or about its conceptual dimensions, which limits the possibilities for measurement and comparison. The aim of the study is to review definitions and models on health literacy to develop an integrated definition and conceptual model capturing the most comprehensive evidence-based dimensions of health literacy.MethodsA systematic literature review was performed to identify definitions and conceptual frameworks of health literacy. A content analysis of the definitions and conceptual frameworks was carried out to identify the central dimensions of health literacy and develop an integrated model.ResultsThe review resulted in 17 definitions of health literacy and 12 conceptual models. Based on the content analysis, an integrative conceptual model was developed containing 12 dimensions referring to the knowledge, motivation and competencies of accessing, understanding, appraising and applying health-related information within the healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion setting, respectively.ConclusionsBased upon this review, a model is proposed integrating medical and public health views of health literacy. The model can serve as a basis for developing health literacy enhancing interventions and provide a conceptual basis for the development and validation of measurement tools, capturing the different dimensions of health literacy within the healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion settings.
Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa30ffaca501fbd391419a92b0cfb25881727700
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In General Health Professions
Citations in the corpus
- The grounded psychometric development and initial validation of the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) (2013, background): “Most previous health literacy questionnaires have been tests of reading competencies in health-related contexts and were not intended to have good coverage of t h currently available definitions of health literacy [19,47].”
- Measuring health literacy in populations: illuminating the design and development process of the European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q) (2013, methodology): “[23] Scale and response format Likert-type scales with a four choice format “Very easy, easy, difficult, very difficult”; “Don’t know” only to be ticked by interviewer.”