Project Details
Projekt
Structural modelling and assessment of health literacy in allergy prevention of new parents (Measurement)
Applicant
Professor Dr. Markus Antonius Wirtz
Subject Area
Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
Term
from 2019 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409800133
Parents of newborn children need appropriate health literacy (HL) to act responsible and adjuvant concerning preventive action for themselves and their families. This includes both preventing the development of allergies in newborns and preventing COVID-19 infections within the family. For diagnostic and evaluative assessment purposes there is a need to define the construct HL for the application fields of early childhood allergy prevention (ECAP) as well as COVID-19 prevention and its structural facets. Based on this conceptual foundation a comprehensive multidimensional assessment instrument will be developed, which allows measuring and analyzing parents’ facet levels of ECAP-HL and COVID-19-HL. The construct HL in the fields of ECAP and COVID-19 prevention will be investigated according to existing models of the more general construct HL. HL can be defined as the ability to purposefully access, comprehend, and reflect health related information as well as to apply the resulting conclusions to problems with respect to health-related decisions to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course. Health literate people are able to find and process health related information and to decide and act purposively to achieve beneficial health goals. ECAP-HL is a more specific construct addressing parent’s perspective on their child’s allergy. ECAP-HL is closely related to allergy specific knowledge, skills and capacities. The COVID-19-GK construct, on the other hand, focuses on the perspective of parents of newborns on the challenges arising from a pandemic situation. The COVID-19-related GK is closely linked to domain-specific knowledge aspects and parental attitudes towards pandemic-related interventions. Parents must be able to assess the child’s health state and risk factors, to pose answerable questions, to search relevant health information, to critically appraise evidence, to evaluate, and to apply the resulting conclusions in ECAP and COVID-19 prevention behavior. In modelling GK, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of parents have to be taken into account, which are subject to adaptation processes in the phase of early parenthood and seem particularly relevant in times of pandemic. A comprehensive literature search on HL and ECAP as well as HL and COVID-19 and comparable pandemic situations as also interviews with new parents and experts will serve as basis for the conceptual and empirical research. To ensure a valid assessment, scenarios will be defined reflecting everyday life situations which are typical in the life of new parents. A comprehensive item pool will be developed and answered by N = 600 parents. Multidimensional construct properties and facet-specific item scales will be analyzed using Item-Response models. The finalized assessment will be validated in a second data collection phase (N = 300 parents). Within the HELICAP network WP6 organizes the communication on the development of a common understanding and a comprehensive definition of the multifaceted constructs ECAP-HL and COVID-19-HL. The ECAP-HL and COVID-19-HL assessment will provide an instrument which allows linking conceptualizations, design and results of HELICAP projects in the second funding phase. Thus, the HELICAP data of several projects can be evaluated in a comprehensive and integrated way, because the same assessments will be applied in different populations as well as scientific scopes and practice contexts investigating ECAP-HL and COVID-19-HL.
DFG Programme
Research Units
