Abstract
Low health literacy has been associated with poor outcomes in health care. Recent research suggests that good health educational material can help to reduce the literacy barrier and enhance health outcome. Immigrant populations are vulnerable to serious health disparities, and language barriers may further exacerbate their limited health literacy in accessing health care information. Yet, ways to help low-literacy parents to look after their children by applying health educational material are still at an early stage of development. The purpose of this study is to compare the educational effectiveness of leaflet and website to deliver knowledge related to children allergy healthcare for immigrant mothers with low literacy, thus establishing design guidelines of health educational materials for low-literate patients. The study was implemented in five stages, including a focus group interview, the development of testing media, a reliability and validity test, a pre-post knowledge test, and a usability survey.The findings revealed the problems low-literate patients usually encountered at the clinic, the pediatric information they most needed, the way they were able to acquire knowledge of children’s healthcare, and the media they usually used to access information. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the leaflet intervention, as well as the website intervention, had a positive outcome. However, there was no significant difference between the influence of design intervention made by the leaflet and by the website. The findings also showed that the criteria used by low-literate patients to evaluate health educational material could be analyzed in terms of the quality of information, presentation, and appeal. An assessment checklist related to the design of health educational materials for low-literate patients was also listed.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Ahern, D., Kreslake, J., Phalen, J.: What is eHealth: Perspectives on the Evolution of eHealth Research. In: Krep, G.L. (ed.) Health Communication. Health Communication and new information technologies (eHealth), vol. 4, pp. 267–287. SAGE Publications Ltd., London (2010)
American Medical Association Foundation. Health literacy. The Foundation, Boston (2008), http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/8115.html (accessed: 150811)
Andersen, P., Andersen, S., Youngblood, E., Colmenares, E.: Health education kiosk for low-literacy patients served by community-based clinics. In: 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, pp. 1–9 (2008)
Bankson, H.L.: Health Literacy: an exploratory bibliometric analysis, 1997-2007. J. Med. Libr. Assoc. 97(2) (April 2009)
Cassell, M., Jackson, C., Cheuvront, B.: Health Communication on the Internet: An Effective Channel for Health Behaviour Change? In: Krep, G.L. (ed.) Health Communication. Health Communication and new information technologies (eHealth), vol. 4, pp. 17–42. SAGE Publications Ltd., London (2010)
Choi, J., Bakken, S.: Web-based education for low-literate parents in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Development of a website and heuristic evaluation and usability testing. International Journal of Medical Informatics 79(8), 565–575 (2010)
Green, J., Tones, K.: Health Promotion: planning and strategies. Sage Publication (2010)
Houts, P., Doak, C., Doak, L., Loscalzo, M.: The role of pictures in improving health communication: A review of research on attention, comprehension, recall, and adherence. Patient Education and Counseling 61(2), 173–190 (2006)
Hung, Y.-L., Stones, C.: A Comparative Study of Children’s eHealth Design between East and West: A Case Study of a Children’s Health Website in China, Taiwan, the UK, and the US. In: Robertson, M.M. (ed.) EHAWC 2011 and HCII 2011. LNCS, vol. 6779, pp. 129–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Ishibashi, Y., Nakajima, I.: The database which creates multilingual web information on preventing infectious diseases. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Enterprise Networking and Computing in Healthcare Industry - Healthcom 2004 (IEEE Cat. No.04EX842), pp. 129–132 (2004)
Jan, R.-L., Wang, J.-Y., Huang, M.-C., Tseng, S.-M., Su, H.-J., Liu, L.-F.: An Internet-based interactive telemonitoring system for improving childhood asthma outcomes in Taiwan. Telemedicine Journal and e-Health 13(3), 257–268 (2007)
Kreuter, M., Strecher, V., Glassman, B.: One Size Does Not Fit All: The Case for Tailoring Print Materials. In: Krep, G.L. (ed.) Health Communication. Health Communication and health promotion, vol. 2, pp. 151–168. SAGE Publications Ltd., London (2010)
Maibach, E., Parrott, R.L. (eds.): Designing health messages: approaches from communication theory and public health practice, Thousand Oaks, Calif. Sage Publications, London (1995c)
Medhi, I., Patnaik, S., Brunskill, E., Gautama, S.N., Thies, W., Toyama, K.: Designing mobile interfaces for novice and low-literacy users. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 18(1) (April 2011)
Yardley, L., Morrison, L.G., Andreou, P., Joseph, J., Little, P.: Understanding reactions to an internet-delivered health-care intervention: accommodating user preferences for information provision. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 10, 52 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hung, YL., Chen, KR., Stones, C., Cassidy, T. (2013). A Comparative Analysis of the Educational Effectiveness of Leaflet and Website for Low-Literate Patients – A Case Study of Immigrant Mothers in Taipei. In: Duffy, V.G. (eds) Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics, and Risk Management. Healthcare and Safety of the Environment and Transport. DHM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8025. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39173-6_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39173-6_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39172-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39173-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)