Is health literacy related to health behaviors and cell phone usage patterns among the text4baby target population?
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Date
2014-05-29
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Abstract
BACKGROUND Text4baby provides educational text messages to pregnant and postpartum women and targets underserved women The primary purpose of this study is to examine the health behaviors and cell phone usage patterns of a text4baby target population and the associations with health literacy METHODS Pregnant and postpartum women were recruited from two Women Infant and Children clinics in Atlanta Women were asked about their demographics selected pregnancy or postpartum health behaviors and cell phone usage patterns Health literacy skills were measured with the English version of the Newest Vital Sign Multivariable logistic regression was used to examine health behaviors and cell usage patterns by health literacy classification controlling for commonly accepted confounders RESULTS Four hundred sixty eight women were recruited and 445 completed the Newest Vital Sign Of these 22 had inadequate health literacy 50 had intermediate health literacy and 28 had adequate health literacy skills Compared to adequate health literacy limited literacy was independently associated with not taking a daily vitamin during pregnancy OR 3 6 95 CI 1 6 8 5 and never breastfeeding their infant OR 1 4 95 CI 1 1 1 8 The majority 69 4 of respondents received nine or more text messages a day prior to enrollment one in four participants 24 6 had changed their number within the last six months and 7 0 of study participants shared a cell phone Controlling for potentially confounding factors those with limited health literacy were more likely to share a cell phone than those with adequate health literacy OR 2 57 95 CI 1 79 3 69 CONCLUSIONS Text4baby messages should be appropriate for low health literacy levels especially as this population may have higher prevalence of targeted unhealthy behaviors Text4baby and other mhealth programs targetting low health literacy populations should also be aware of the different ways that these populations use their cell phones including sharing cell phones which may mean participants will not receive messages or have special privacy concerns frequently changing cell phone numbers which could lead to higher drop off rates and the penetrance of text messages in a population that receives many messages daily
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Newborn, Infant, Adult, Children Under 5 years, Women (only), Client, Communication roadblocks, Access to information or data, Alignment with local norms, Addressing individual beliefs and practices, Scaled program, Optimization, Individual based, Maternal health, Child Health, Preventive, Short-term, Health education or promotion, SMS, Text