Mechanisms of Health Literacy and Information Accessibility in the Deaf
Condition: Hearing Loss; Health Literacy
MeSH terms: Hearing Loss; Deafness
Study type: Observational

Summary: 
      The purpose of this proposal is to examine the attitudes, knowledge, and skills related to
      health information that influence health literacy among Deaf individuals.The study team will
      also examine frequently overlooked potential predictors of health literacy, including
      cognitive abilities, resilience, and self-efficacy. To achieve the study objectives,
      researchers will conduct an explanatory sequential mixed methods design using extensive
      quantitative data collection procedures, namely, cross-sectional surveys and measures that
      will identify predictors and moderators of health literacy with Deaf and hearing subjects.
      These results will inform the subsequent qualitative assessment using elicitation interviews
      that will help explain the quantitative results, and elucidate how and why Deaf individuals
      access and understand health information. A community advisory board consisting of Deaf
      community members will provide oversight to the proposal that will be led by multiple Deaf
      investigators, including the PI. The Deaf community, due to communication barriers, relative
      social marginalization, and their reliance on visual learning, provides a unique insight into
      how health information is distributed and disseminated visually. Findings may be applicable
      to other individuals with hearing loss who navigate and cope with life more visually than the
      typical hearing person. This will be critical to determine more accurately the effect of
      visual learning and existing online health information on health literacy.
    

Detailed description: 
      University of Michigan(UM) is the clinical coordinating center (CCC) and data coordinating
      center (DCC) for this study. There are no subject recruitment or interaction will take place
      at UM. CCC engages clinicians and the clinical research mission and provides the training and
      professional development to ensure effective study by recruiting and maintaining the study
      sites performed at the Hurley Medical Center at Flint, Michigan, The National Technical
      Institute of Technology(NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York,
      and The Sinai Deaf Health(SDH)program in Chicago, Illinois including participates. Thus,
      educating and training investigators, study coordinators, and other research staff to ensure
      an ongoing quality improvement of research processes. DCC is highly invested in producing the
      highest quality survey questionnaires for use with deaf ASL-users and hearing, English
      speakers. The study team will only use the best possible ASL translations of the data
      collection measures in order to best obtain accurate, high-quality research.

      University of Michigan (UM) will function as the lead site, not as a performance site. UM
      will oversee all three other sites and conduct quality checks with each site, assist with
      training of the staff for standardization, and conduct data management/storage of
      de-identified data along with analysis. Hard copies and identifiers will be maintained at
      each site as per their approved IRB protocols.

      The two primary objectives of this proposal are:

        -  To elucidate the role of information marginalization on health literacy in Deaf American
           Sign Language (ASL) users

        -  To better understand the mechanisms of health literacy in this population so as to
           identify viable targets for future health literacy intervention development. This
           proposal is responsive to PAR-10-133's request for studies that assess mechanisms
           underlying health literacy, including roles of cognition, culture, language fluency, and
           information-seeking and interpretation ability in the deaf population and, how these may
           differ from the hearing population.

      A secondary objective is to assess how varying levels of hearing loss can affect individuals'
      abilities to access and comprehend health information and their health literacy adequacy.
    

Intervention name(s): Health Information Assessment
Intervention type(s): Other
Intervention description(s): Assess how hearing loss and health literacy alters the ability to access and comprehend online health information
Observational model: Other
Time perspective: Cross-Sectional
Sampling method: Non-Probability Sample
Study population: 
        450 Deaf ASL users and 450 Hearing native English speakers
      
Keywords: Hearing Loss; Deaf; Health Literacy; Health Information; Visual Learning