Reading Engagement Offsets Declines in Processing Capacity for Health Literacy

摘要

Understanding patient skills, abilities, and other resources related to health literacy is crucial for improvement of self-care knowledge and behaviors. The current study explored links between cognitive abilities, knowledge, and reading engagement within the framework of process-knowledge model of health literacy (e.g., Chin et al., 2011) as measured using the S-TOFHLA (Baker et al., 1999). The data suggest that more reading engagement compensates limits of processing capacity for better health-related literacy. The results imply that patient education about the benefits of engagement in reading activities may potentially improve health literacy and comprehension of self-care information among older adults with lower processing capacity.