Tsai, Hsiu-Min
Chang Gung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Title: Effects of the health literacy mobile app on females’ self-leaning, self-efficacy, health promoting behavior and health literacy
Biography
Biography: Tsai, Hsiu-Min
Abstract
The purposes of this research were to: (1) develop the Female Health Literacy Mobile App, (2) implement and evaluate App effects on females’ self-leaning, self-efficacy, health promoting behavior and health literacy. The research was a pre-experimental design with pre- and post-test. Snowball sampling was used to recruit participants. A total of 443 multi-ethnic females (Taiwanese, aboriginal, Vietnamese) participated in the study: 326 of them completed pretest and 118 completed both pretest and posttest. Instruments used including demographic information sheet, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, Self-Directed Learning Instrument, Adolescents’ Health-Promoting Behavior, and Health Literacy Vocabulary Scale for Taiwanese Women. Mean age of the participants was 32.19 years. Large proportion of the participants were Taiwanese, single, employed or owned a home business, had an educational level equal or higher than senior high school, had a family income between 30,000 and 50,000 NTD. Participants who graduated from high school or above scored higher on scales measuring self-learning, health promoting behavior, and health literacy. In the pretest, no significant differences were found among different ethnicities in self-leaning, self-efficacy, health promoting behavior, and health literacy. From the posttest, Hakka females scored significantly higher on self-learning, self-efficacy, and health literacy than other ethnicities. Paired t tests showed that female of any ethnicity group scored higher on self-learning, self-efficacy, health promoting behavior, and health literacy after using the Female Health Literacy Mobile App (p<.01).