Health Literacy

We talked about Health Literacy in class this week. Most people seemed to enjoy the video, but I felt a little more ambivalent about it. A lot of the ways they discussed functionally illerate people reminded me of the article "Is there a hard to reach audience?" Excuses for not targeting hard to reach populations (like the functionally illiterate) in the proper way has included talk about how illiterate people have conceptual deficits. But the article said that this isn't true and that this idea and others like it labels people. It makes failing to target and effectively reach them their fault instead of placing the blame with public health professionals. Anyways, the video very briefly seemed to mention conceptual differences. It wasn't obvious, but I thought a bit of the negative attitude exposed in the hard to reach article was there. Truthfully, I also thought the psychologist who tests motorcycle focus groups was a bit of a sell-out. I could be biased though, especially given the product. I tend to think that driving cars is unhealthy, so motorcycling definitely doesn't fall in the health-promoting category for me.

I thought that the SMOG/FOG test was an interesting idea and a good tool. But what about words like "exercise", "physical activity", etc.? We use those words all of the time even though they have 3 syllables and would thus raise the reading level. I guess there's a balance. My group got it down to 6th grade reading level. Is that too low? Would people be offended? In the end, this lab can help us reach the low literacy group. But the situation seems more dire than that, so should we actually be focusing on more visual messages? It was good to get a reality check and to get out of the ivory tower. My job doesn't always allow me direct access to the community so it's easy to forget about readability. As students, we have to separate classwork from work in the community. We are expected to work from a higher level of literacy in classes, so it's easy to let that spill over into health communication pieces for the community.