Abstract
Objective
To assess the health literacy and numeracy skills of Spanish-speaking parents of young
children and to validate a new Spanish language health literacy assessment for parents,
the Spanish Parental Health Literacy Activities Test (PHLAT Spanish).
Methods
Cross-sectional study of Spanish-speaking caregivers of young children (<30 months)
enrolled at primary care clinics in 4 academic medical centers. Caregivers were administered
the 10-item PHLAT in addition to validated tests of health literacy (S-TOFHLA) and
numeracy (WRAT-3 Arithmetic). Psychometric analysis was used to examine item characteristics
of the PHLAT-10 Spanish, to assess its correlation with sociodemographics and performance
on literacy/numeracy assessments, and to generate a shorter 8-item scale (PHLAT-8).
Results
Of 176 caregivers, 77% had adequate health literacy (S-TOFHLA), whereas only 0.6%
had 9th grade or greater numeracy skills. Mean PHLAT-10 score was 41.6% (SD 21.1).
Fewer than one-half (45.5%) were able to read a liquid antibiotic prescription label
and demonstrate how much medication to administer within an oral syringe. Less than
one-third (31.8%) were able to interpret a food label to determine whether it met
WIC (Special supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children) guidelines.
Greater PHLAT-10 score was associated with greater years of education (r = 0.49),
S-TOFHLA (r = 0.53), and WRAT-3 (r = 0.55) scores (P < .001). Internal reliability was good (Kuder-Richardson coefficient of reliability;
KR-20 = 0.61). An 8-item scale was highly correlated with the full 10-item scale (r
= 0.97, P < .001), with comparable internal reliability (KR-20 = 0.64).
Conclusions
Many Spanish-speaking parents have difficulty performing health-related literacy and
numeracy tasks. The Spanish PHLAT demonstrates good psychometric characteristics and
may be useful for identifying parents who would benefit from receiving low-literacy
child health information.
Keywords
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Article Info
Publication History
Published online: November 07, 2011
Accepted:
August 28,
2011
Received:
February 28,
2011
Footnotes
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 Academic Pediatric Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
