Nutrition-specific health literacy: development and testing of a multi-dimensional questionnaire
- 15.11.2016
- English Articles
- Corinna Krause
- Kathrin Sommerhalder
- Sigrid Beer-Borst
Peer-reviewed | Manuscript received: : March 22, 2016 | Revision accepted: July 07, 2016
Nutrition-specific health literacy: development and testing of a multi-dimensional questionnaire
Introduction
The World Health Organization defines health literacy as the cognitive and social skills that motivate and enable individuals to adopt a lifestyle that is beneficial to their health [1]. NUTBEAM distinguishes between three forms of health literacy (HL):
(1) Functional HL describes the ability to find and understand health-related information.
(2) Interactive HL describes the ability to exchange views about health issues in one’s environment and to transfer the information received to one’s own situation.
(3) Critical HL describes the ability to critically assess and question information in order to actively promote one’s own and others’ health [2, 3].
The concept of HL provides a basis for a more comprehensive understanding of everyday healthy actions, including eating behavior and physical activity [4]. The concept is therefore also of interest to nutritional science and education [5, 6]. Scientific literature uses the terms ‘nutrition literacy’ or ‘food literacy’ to describe this concept, albeit inconsistently. However, as both terms describe specific forms of HL [6, 7], this study has adopted the term ‘nutrition-specific health literacy’.
Summary
Nutritional knowledge, food skills, and an awareness of one’s eating behavior are core competencies in the concept of nutrition-specific health literacy. There are very few instruments to measure this increasingly important concept in health and nutritional science. This study describes the stepwise development of a comprehensive questionnaire for the self-evaluation of nutrition-specific health literacy among adults. The questions were developed in accordance with a working definition and were assessed as to their applicability and comprehensibility in a two-stage pre-test among a target group. The final questionnaire comprises 16 questions and is currently being used for the first time in a Swiss intervention study in an occupational setting. Further validation (construct validity) will show whether this instrument is suitable for use in other studies.
Keywords: health literacy, nutrition literacy, food literacy, questionnaire, nutritional education, Public Health Nutrition
