Creating a new, culturally adapted questionnaire of parental health literacy: concept and experience

Abstract

Introduction: Parental health literacy is not only an important determinant of children's health, but it also influences the health related decisions of the next adult generation. However, surveying health literacy should be conducted with caution, since the definition of the concept and the nature of the questionnaire based on this concept influence the results. The aim of our research was to develop and study the subindices of parental health literacy using a questionnaire based on a new culturally adapted definition and themes of parental health literacy.
Methods: We conducted the survey of this newly developed questionnaire on a Hungarian nationwide sample, which was representative ofthe households with 0-18 year-old children. The sample included 430 households. In each case, the respondent was the adult, who is most responsible for decisions about children's health. 92 percent of these respondents were women and 8 percent were men. Based on the questions in the questionnaire and according to the previously created definition, we created the indices of the four main dimensions (self-confidence, knowledge, problem-solving, knowledge-demand) of parental health literacy.
Results: The preliminary results show, that according to the correlation coefficients the four main dimensions of parental health literacy are actually separated from each other.
Conclusions: Our questionnaire gives independent information of the four dimensions of parental health literacy. Thus it may help child healthcare providers in everyday work to assist the parents’ choices on their children’s health. It may also facilitate future studies of the connection between parental health literacy and different aspects of paediatric health.