Capital endowment, health information literacy and healthy dietary behaviors: Evidence from a survey of Chinese rural residents

Abstract

Unhealthy diets threaten people’s health and this is exacerbated by capital inequality. Drawing on Bourdieu’s capital theory, this study constructs a model of residents’ healthy diet decision to analyze the effects of capital endowment and health information literacy on rural residents’ healthy dietary behaviors in China. Based on a dataset of 899 rural residents from 16 prefecture cities in Shandong Province in 2022, confirmatory factor analysis and path hypothesis test of capital endowment and health information literacy were conducted using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). We examined the mediating effect of health information literacy, tested the generalizability of the healthy diet decision model by Multi-Group analysis, and examined the importance ranking of model variables by Importance-Performance map analysis. Economic capital, cultural capital, cognitive social capital, and health information literacy had a significant positive correlation with healthy dietary behaviors, among which cognitive social capital had the strongest correlation, while structural social capital did not have a significant correlation. In addition to directly influencing rural residents’ healthy dietary behaviors, health information literacy also played a mediating effect in residents’ healthy diet decision model. Our healthy diet decision model had certain generalization ability. The government and other related parties should expand the channels for rural residents to obtain cognitive social capital to improve the accessibility of cognitive social capital for rural residents and improve their ability to obtain, identify and apply health information by means of publicity and education.