People's knowledge of health and disease

A community survey based on the Cardiff electoral register was carried out in 1986. Seven hundred and ten adults were asked 10 open-ended questions about common serious illnesses in the United Kingdom and were given 18 statements about common diseases and asked to state whether they were true or false. This paper reports their responses. Amongst those gaining the highest scores there were more young people, more females, more from social classes I and II and more who had been educated to college or university level. We discuss the implications of the results for patient behaviour and for health education programmes.