Health Literacy in Adolescents With Sickle Cell Disease
Section snippets
Purpose
Approximately five and a half million children in the U.S. are living with a chronic illness, including HIV, sickle cell disease, asthma and diabetes (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, National Center for Healthcare Statistics, 2011). It is estimated that 90% of these children will now live until at least the age of 20; thus, most of these children will be transferred from the care of a pediatrician to an adult health provider sometime during their late adolescent years (Blum,
Design and Methods
This study used a descriptive, correlational cross-sectional design to explore the facilitators and barriers to health literacy levels in adolescents with sickle cell disease (SCD). A framework for studying adolescent health literacy was developed by Manganello and is named the Adolescent Health Literacy Model (Manganello, 2008). This model was used for this project to help conceptually and operationally define variables. Please see Fig. 1 for a graphic of the original model by Manganello (2008)
Results
Data were entered into IBM SPSS 22.0 Statistical Software for analysis. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed to examine the demographic characteristics of the sample. Pearson and Spearman correlations were performed to examine relationships among all study variables. Both multiple and simple regressions were also performed to identify predictor variables that contributed most to health literacy scores in this sample.
Because the validated health literacy instrument for adolescents is
Discussion
This study contributes several significant findings to the literature. First, this study revealed the previously unknown current state of health literacy in a sample of adolescents with SCD. The REALM-Teen health literacy instrument that was used for this study is designed to correlate raw scores with grade level literacy. With a mean score of 53.7, the average grade level literacy equivalent for this sample was 6th–7th grade despite the fact that the average grade level for this sample was 8th
Conclusions and Practice Implications
This study not only provided much needed insight into the health literacy levels of adolescents with SCD, but it also yielded meaningful implications for future clinical care and research in varying fields of study. Firstly, this study showed that evaluating health literacy scores in adolescents with SCD is feasible as all adolescents who agreed to participate were able to complete both scales and administration time was approximately two to five minutes for each instrument. Therefore, the
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Dr. George Buchanan for your guidance and mentorship on this project. I am forever grateful that you have always believed in me. Furthermore, thank you to the entire Hematology team at Children's Health Dallas for your unwavering support and help on this project. Thank you as well to those who helped to fund this study: Sigma Theta Tau (Epsilon Theta Chapter) Research Grant Award and the Rew Family Graduate Research Endowment in Nursing.
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Health literacy of children and adolescents
2018, KontaktCitation Excerpt :Murphy et al. [17] proved a positive correlation between the level of HL of HIV-positive adolescents and medication use and medical care. Perry et al. [21] proved a low level of HL of children and adolescents who suffer from sickle-cell anaemia. Valerio et al. [24] proved a significant relationship between an insufficient level of HL and the report of asthma management regarding the use of health-care.
Health literacy of adolescents
2020, Journal of Pediatric NursingCitation Excerpt :In contrast to previous studies, however, there was no significant relationship between age and health literacy in this population of adolescents. Previous studies show a significant, positive relationship between adolescent health literacy and age (Caldwell, 2019; Fleary et al., 2018; Perry et al., 2017). While the mean age of this sample is similar to previous studies, it was found that 90 adolescents (86%) in this sample were older than 14 years of age.
The relationshıp between health literacy and eating attitudes of adolescents
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