Associations between older adults' spoken interactive health literacy and selected health care and health communication outcomes

Recent trends in the conceptualization of health literacy lead toward expansive notions of health literacy as social practice, rather than as a narrower cognitive capacity to understand health-related texts and materials. These expansive and complex constructions of health literacy demand tools for assessing individuals' propensities to actively seek information in their interactions with health care professionals and other health information sources. This study proposes a measure of this information-exchange component of health literacy and examines its capacity to predict outcomes and processes such as satisfaction with health care and comprehension of spoken health messages. Results for this sample ( n = 334) of low socioeconomic status older adults (mean age = 74.70 years) reveal that indices derived from the Measure of Interactive Health Literacy (MIHL) do contribute unique variance-apart from document-based health-literacy--on several criterion measures such as satisfaction with health care services. Comprehension checking improved health message listening comprehension, but for White participants only. These findings invite further investigations of interactive health literacy involving different populations, message topics, and elicitation methods.