Thesis
Health Literacy in Older Adults: Factor Structure of the Newest Vital Sign and Its Relation to Cognition and Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005220
Abstract
Objective: Health literacy tends to decrease with age, and lower health literacy has been associated with lower levels of physical function, mental health, and medication adherence. The present study aims to further understand the factor structure of a commonly used health literacy measure, the Newest Vital Signs (NVS), in a sample of community-dwelling older adults and explore the cognitive correlates related to this measure. This study also aims to examine how health literacy relates to engagement in healthy aging lifestyle behaviors in everyday life.Participants and Methods: 128 older adults (age: M = 72.07, SD = 6.71; education: M = 16.34, SD = 2.56; 74% female) completed a health literacy measure (Newest Vital Sign; NVS), a lifestyle behavior questionnaire (Healthy Aging Activity Engagement scale; HAAE), and several neuropsychological tests. The cognitive domains assessed included memory (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test short and long delay), executive functioning (verbal fluency and category fluency switching), and attention/working memory (Digit Span Forward and Backward).
Results: Confirmatory factor analysis did not reveal a two-factor structure of the NVS due to a nearly perfect correlation between items five and six. However, based on a prior study, two new variables were computed to represent the factors of document and numeracy literacy; these factors demonstrated a small correlation (r = .18). Attention/working memory, executive function, and memory were all significantly related to numeracy literacy. Only memory was significantly related to document literacy. After accounting for age and global cognitive status, a hierarchical regression revealed that document literacy significantly predicted engagement in healthy aging lifestyle behaviors.
Conclusion: Multiple cognitive abilities are necessary for searching, finding, and processing information related to health to make health-related decisions. Document literacy accounted for a significant amount of variance in older adults' engagement in everyday lifestyle behaviors, thus indicating document literacy skills as an area of focus for intervention efforts to improve brain health in older adults.
Metrics
56 File views/ downloads
26 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Health Literacy in Older Adults
- Creators
- Carolyn Rebecca Pagan
- Contributors
- Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (Advisor)Leonard Burns (Committee Member)Renee Magnan (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Psychology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 43
- Identifiers
- 99901019834901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis