Characterizing the Environmental Health Literacy and Sensemaking of Indoor Air Quality of Research Participants.

Kathryn S Tomsho,Gary Adamkiewicz,Rima E Rudd,Erin Polka,David Queeley,Marty Alvarez,Madeleine K Scammell,Karen M Emmons,Stacey Chacker

doi:10.3390/ijerph19042227

Abstract

This study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with the participants of an indoor air quality monitoring study. The purpose of the interviews was to capture participants’ perceptions of indoor air quality and engage them in a discussion of those factors that influenced their behavior. Interview study participants (n = 20) noted the importance of family health concerns and their own sensory awareness of possible contaminants. They discussed their level of personal control over their home environment as well as their access to needed resources. This study is based on grounded theory and applies interpretivist epistemological methods. Study findings offer insights into how people perceive their home environment and what influences their decision making and action. Analyses indicate that perceived agency, risk perception, access to resources, and information all influenced participants’ sense of ability to take action as well as their interest in taking action. These insights serve to challenge some of the current work in environmental health literacy which tends to focus on and measure an individual’s knowledge or skills. Our analysis suggests that consideration be given to a number of factors that include perceived agency, access to resources, and the quality of information provided.

Highlights

Providing accessible information regarding environmental exposures can facilitate practical outcomes, such as adopting exposure-reduction behaviors
There is growing interest in identifying the best means of providing environmental health information to lay audiences and the resultant impacts on knowledge gain and behavior adoption [2,3,4]. Interest in this area has led to the genesis of a new research domain: environmental health literacy (EHL) [2,5]
Much of the early work associated with EHL “focused primarily on elucidating the attributes of EHL and on the stages of becoming literate about environmental health concepts and issues” [1]

Summary

Introduction

Providing accessible information regarding environmental exposures can facilitate practical outcomes, such as adopting exposure-reduction behaviors. There is growing interest in identifying the best means of providing environmental health information to lay audiences and the resultant impacts on knowledge gain and behavior adoption [2,3,4]. Interest in this area has led to the genesis of a new research domain: environmental health literacy (EHL) [2,5]. A great deal of the focus has been on content knowledge (typically via pre-post assessments), adopting exposure-reduction behaviors, or creating tools to evaluate baseline levels of EHL [2,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion