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Learning Objective 1: To understand the relationship between health literacy and health promoting behaviors in four different ethnic groups of women.
Learning Objective 2: To understand related predictive factors of health literacy among multi-ethnic women in Taiwan.
This research intended to understand the present status of health literacy, and the relationship between health literacy and health promoting behaviors among multiethnic women in Taiwan.
Methods:
Both convenience and snowball sampling methods were applied for participant recruitment. A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was used for data collection. The participants were community dwelling female adults living in northern Taiwan. A total of 378 female participants were contacted and 347 valid questionnaires were analyzed. Health literacy was measured with Taiwan Health Literacy Scale, and health promoting behaviors were measured by the Chinese version of Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis test, Spearman’s correlation analyses, and regression.
Results:
About half of the participants were Taiwanese and the other half were ethnic minorities including Aborigine, mainland Chinese, and Vietnamese. Results showed that our participants had moderate level of health literacy, and 33.1% of them had inadequate health literacy. Those with inadequate health literacy were more likely to be younger, not high-school graduate, Vietnamese; have lower monthly family income, use a second language, have no diagnosed diseases, and regard TV/radio as the most useful source for health information. Health literacy alone could significantly predict health promoting behaviors
Conclusion:
In this study, we raised three research questions and answers were: (1) one third of women in Taiwan were inadequate in health literacy; (2) those with lower health literacy were more likely to be younger, Vietnamese, using a second language, not high-school graduate, with lower monthly family income, with no diagnosed disease, and regarding TV/radio as the most useful sources of health information; and (3) health literacy explained a small fraction of the differences in health promoting behaviors. This presentation describes part of a larger study that was funded by National Science Council (NSC 101-2511-S-255-007).