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Published on: February 13, 2020
Health literacy skills of U.S. adults
1Department of Society, Human Development and Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston MA 02115, USA. rrudd@hsph.harvard.edu
Objectives:
To examine adults' literacy proficiencies in multiple health contexts.
Methods:
One hundred ninety-one (191) health-related items drawn from all large-scale adult literacy surveys before 2003 were scored as an independent health literacy scale. Latent class analyses provide portraits of adults with different health literacy skills.
Results:
Adults without a high school diploma or GED, with health-related restrictions, with limited access to resources, who are members of minority population groups, and who are immigrants - have lower health literacy skills than do others.
Conclusions:
The distribution of health literacy is not independent of general literacy skills at population or subpopulation levels.
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