Health Literacy and Health Seeking Behavior of Parents of Young Children

by Pialee Roy

Overview

In 2007 to 2012 Delaware reported that they ranked last or up to 26th in the nation for achieving the completion of developmental screenings to determine achievement of a child's milestones or identification of need for early intervention for those with developmental disability or delay. When the task was designated to preschools instead of pediatric primary care, another disparity arose with access to either. Lower ability to obtain, process, and access health information results in costly emergency room overusage, and poor health management and health outcomes, especially for twenty percent of children below age 5 living in poverty and coping with obesity and related conditions results the risk factors for worse pediatric health outcomes. Past health literacy studied adolescent and adult health literacy in clinical settings in English only. This study reviewed Nonclinical settings for parental health literacy, parent education, screenings and referrals.
Voluntary participation in survey research was completed with 220 parents from 12 Head Start and Non Head Start preschools in New Castle County, Delaware. Four paper surveys,administered in English and Spanish, Green and Kreuter's 2005 Precede-Proceed model is applied to an original logical model for determining a need for a preschool health literacy intervention to inform better child health outcomes. Results indicate that low-income, minority families, have fewer health books at home, which is associated with lower parental health literacy, higher child BMI, and more health care referrals for managing childhood obesity. Lower Nutritional/ Functional health literacy scores for understanding health information disproportionately affected minority families in Head Start programs for Hispanic families, even when surveys were administered in Spanish, and Black families respectively, however these preschools offer more parent health education and twice the rate of referrals to primary care as Non Head Start programs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668518649
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	12/31/2018
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Originally from Massachusetts and having lived and worked in both that state and Delaware, I have been fascinated about a variety of Social Policies, Programs, and their Evaluations. My studies include Human Development, Psychology, Child Development, Public Health and Public Policy from both University of Delaware and Tufts University. Past experiences have shaped my interests from jobs/internships with state departments of public health and early education and care, to hospital research centers, and university settings for survey research, as well as my own establishment of nonprofit research work.
My dissertation research work compared Head Start to on Head Start going families for their health literacy and health seeking behavior levels to address childhood obesity. I have a strong interest in all parts of the research process from mentoring data collectors, to analyzing data to publishing reports. In the past I have worked on bilingual preschool age children’s language and literacy assessments and can appreciate the importance of accurate data collection. I am driven to work towards the application of more evidence-based research and data driven social policies. I am interested in education as a path out of poverty and education as part of the promotion of resilience in students, especially where health domains intersect with education to promote school readiness and success in youth. I have had the opportunity to work on a field project that addressed retention of homeless youth in high schools, English language assessment for bilingual Spanish speaking children in Head Start programs, and program evaluation of family support and home visiting programs, and data analysis support statewide community profiles of supply, demand, and quality of early education programs . In 2016, I had the opportunity to serve as a Delaware future leader fellow for the Delaware Department of Education contributing to review work on early education teacher compensation and retention. I have had opportunities to work on comparing educational disparities in Wilmington and non-Wilmington regions as part of the Community Engagement Initiative. The role also introduced me to supporting the education community to build partnerships for professional collaborations and how to leverage resources for serving the needs of students and colleagues. Through teaching, research, and community support, I continue to explore these topics! Thank you, Pialee Roy, Ph.D.