Evaluation of Health Literacy and Some of Its Associated Factors among 18-65 Years Old

The purpose of this study was to evaluate of health literacy and some of its associated factors among 18-65 years old clients referred to dezful health and treatment centers, iran, 2018  

This is a descriptive-analytical study with a sample size of 1575 subjects which is conducted in 2018 on Dezful 18-65 years old people. In this study, Dezful municipality's three districts were considered as three clusters; then, two Health and Treatment Centers were selected by random assignment from each cluster, after that sampling was performed by simple random sampling on the target population. The data collection instrument in this study was Montazeri et al. Standard Health Literacy Questionnaire. SPSS 21 software and statistical methods of the correlation coefficient, independent t-test, one-way ANOVA were used to data analysis.

The mean age of the subjects was 32 ± 3 (Scores ranged from 18 to 65 years old) and the mean score of health literacy was 70.19 (Scores ranged from 1 to 100). The mean score of health literacy, in five dimensions, has been respectively (information accessibility) 67.26, (comprehension) 78.81, (information reading) 71.79, (evaluating information) 69.33, (decision making and behavior) 66.41. In rating health literacy, 13.07 percent had insufficient health literacy, 21.52 percent had not so much insufficient health literacy, 38.47 percent had sufficient health literacy, and 26.92 percent had higher health literacy. The results also showed that there is a significant relationship between health literacy, and background variables such as education level (x2=314.857,p=0.010), occupation (x2=73.290,p=0.001), marital status (x2=24.85,p=0.019), but this relationship was not significant in gender (x2=3.944,p=0.268).

The results of this study showed that 34.1% of the subjects had inadequate health literacy, which proper planning is needed to improve the health literacy level of the statistical universe in this study.