Assessing the Understandability and Actionability of Education Materials for Agricultural Workers' Health

Agricultural health and safety educators, including community health workers and Extension agents, represent an important community of practice, connecting agricultural workers (i.e. migrant and seasonal farmworkers) to health information and care. We sought to identify and evaluate existing education resources available to educators for use in health education and outreach with farmworkers.

This study used a systemized search process to identify health education materials in English and Spanish used in the United States. Two independent coders coded each material for its understandability and actionability using the Patient Educational Material Assessment Tool (PEMAT). We report descriptive statistics by type of material, topic, and publication date of the material.

We identified farmworker health education materials (n = 602) from across the United States. The average understandability score was 86%, and the average actionability score was 76%. Materials were most commonly print material in the format of handouts, brochures, and posters. Some topic areas (e.g. musculoskeletal injuries) had considerably more resources than others (e.g. green tobacco).

This research represents the first, to our knowledge, comprehensive assessment of health education materials for education and outreach to agricultural workers. While the average scores for understandability and actionability were high among materials, there is room to build a stronger set of resources in some topic areas and to modernize materials for electronic delivery. Using PEMAT tools can help the Extension and community health worker communities of practice improve the quality of materials they share with agricultural workers.