Journal of health communication
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Limited health literacy has been linked to worse health outcomes for a range of medical conditions. In addition, limited health literacy is more prevalent among specific racial and ethnic minorities. Although these findings have been widely acknowledged, little systematic research has been conducted to elucidate the role of health literacy in the creation of health disparities or to evaluate the possibility that interventions relating to health literacy may help eliminate health disparities. This paper presents recommendations for a research agenda that is focused on advancing the science for how health literacy research can promote the effort to eliminate health disparities.
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Numerous calls for a public health approach to health literacy and visions of a health literate society have appeared in recent years. Yet, many gaps in what we know about and do to improve health literacy remain. ⋯ Each of the frameworks generates questions and uses methods that can produce new findings about health literacy. Using the frameworks will open new investigations into population health and health literacy improvement at multiple levels.
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Many people look for health information online, and the Internet is the third most trusted health information source. What implications does this trust have on consumer health? Not much research has been done in this area. ⋯ The 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey data were analyzed. Results showed that controlling for demographics, trust in online health information was directly related to both Internet use for health and the self-efficacy belief, and was indirectly associated with negative emotions; the latter two factors in turn were associated with self-rated health.
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Communication and health information seeking play a significant role in the promotion of cancer prevention behaviors, including screening. Data from a sample of information seekers who contacted the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) Cancer Information Service (CIS; N = 20,412) were split randomly into an exploratory and validation sample to conduct signal detection analysis predicting cancer prevention information seeking. Important predictors of seeking prevention information in the exploratory sample were type of information seeker, communication channel, age, and gender; these findings generally were confirmed in the validation sample. Our findings also reveal important information about the demographic characteristics and communication channel preferences of cancer prevention information seekers.
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Often, people are able to recall a message on a particular topic for a long period of time. These memorable messages have the ability to influence behavior when they are recalled from memory long after initial exposure. Knowing the topics and sources of the messages that are remembered about breast cancer can improve the efficacy of future breast cancer outreach. ⋯ The media were a major source of all four topics of messages, although family members, friends, and the medical community were major sources for particular message topics as well. Memorable messages originating from medical professionals were substantially more likely to motivate detection behaviors than prevention behaviors. This research demonstrates that message topic and source both play roles in determining message recall as well as in determining how memorable messages impacted behavior.