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Related Experiment Videos

General performance on a numeracy scale among highly educated samples.

I M Lipkus1, G Samsa, B K Rimer

  • 1Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27701, USA. lipku001@mc.duke.edu

Medical Decision Making : an International Journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making
|February 24, 2001
PubMed
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Even highly educated individuals struggle with basic health numeracy, indicating potential flaws in how health risks are communicated. Tailored communication strategies are needed to improve understanding of numerical health information.

Area of Science:

  • Health Communication
  • Risk Perception
  • Quantitative Literacy

Background:

  • Numeracy, or the ability to understand basic probability and math, influences health risk perception.
  • Poor performance on numeracy tasks is observed across various education levels.
  • This study investigates numeracy in highly educated adults using general and health-specific scales.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To assess the numeracy skills of highly educated adults on general and health-related risk scales.
  • To identify difficulties in understanding and performing mathematical operations with health risk information.
  • To evaluate the effectiveness of current health risk communication strategies.

Main Methods:

  • 463 adults aged 40+ completed a 3-item general numeracy scale and a 7-item expanded health numeracy scale.

Related Experiment Videos

  • The expanded scale assessed operations with percentages, proportions, and probabilities related to risk magnitudes.
  • Factor analysis was used to examine the underlying construct of global numeracy.

    • Main Results:

    • Only 18% and 32% of participants answered all items correctly on the general and expanded scales, respectively.
    • 16-20% of participants incorrectly answered basic risk magnitude comparison questions.
    • Factor analysis confirmed that both scales measure global numeracy.

    Conclusions:

    • Highly educated individuals demonstrate significant difficulties with fundamental numeracy questions, echoing previous findings.
    • Current methods for communicating numerical health risks may be inadequate.
    • Further research is needed on tailoring health risk communication to individual numeracy levels.