The Self-Efficacy of Health Literacy and Affecting Factors: A Metasynthesis Study

Health literacy has been attended by UNESCO and all human societies from years ago. Due to the importance of this kind of literacy in individual and society health status, many studies have been conducted on the development of this type of literacy in various fields of health and medicine. Self-efficacy can help the people to promote their health literacy, and on the other hand, is related to the ability of individuals to maintain their own, family, and community health. This study reviewed the self-efficacy of health literacy and affecting factors in previous studies. The present study used a far-reaching approach to analyze the findings of qualitative studies on health literacy. After identifying the keywords and searching the internal and external databases including Magiran, Scientific Information Database (SID), and PubMed, 649 articles were found. By reviewing articles and applying language, years, and study type filters 25 papers were selected, and the categories were extracted using Shannon's table and Cohen's Kappa coefficient. Codes were classified into three categories and eight concepts. The category of psychological factors included three concepts of self-management, individual skills, and social skills, the category of communication components included two concepts of communication and health information exchange, and the category of educational factors included three concepts of educational content and resources, educational barriers and constraints, and educational effectiveness. Codes such as self-efficacy, self-management, awareness of disease symptoms, and awareness of preventive measures had the most prevalence among various categories. In this study, factors affecting the self-efficacy of health literacy were identified, that could be used to plan effective health literacy training programs to promote health status.