Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Young children rely on their parents to make health decisions and manage illness on their behalf. However, one in three Canadian parents struggle to find, understand and use health information and services, a problem known as low health literacy. Low health literacy contributes to poor illness management, higher health care use, and increased costs to the health system. Finding ways to clearly and meaningfully communicate health information to parents is urgently needed to improve health literacy and quality care for children. Stories and pictures are powerful ways of communicating with low literacy groups, but research is needed on how and why these approaches work. This research responds to this knowledge gap by developing a transferable explanatory theory about how, why, when, where and for whom story and picture-based communications impact parent's health literacy, which can later be used to inform future research and policy. First, the complex concept of health literacy will be analyzed to create a clear understanding of the term. Second, a panel of experts will be convened to provide input on potential theories about story and picture-based communication strategies. Using data from these first two steps, a literature review known as realist synthesis will be conducted to identify how, why, when, where, and for whom stories and pictures work to impact parental health literacy. The result of this research is a transferable theory on story and picture-based communication strategies for parental health literacy, which will be later used for (a) developing and testing communication interventions for various childhood conditions and contexts and (b) developing and testing interventions to improve how receptive a particular setting is to the story and picture-based strategy. This research forms the foundation for a program of research on clear, creative communication strategies to help parents understand and use health information in decision making in Canada.