Health literacy, self efficacy and health information understanding: impacts on health related decision making.

Health literacy (HL), self-efficacy (SE), and health information (HI) understanding are three significant domains associated with generating health related decision. An individual will be able to make an appropriate decision pertaining health if he or she has remarkable levels for those three domains. The purpose of this study were to evaluate the level of health literacy, self-efficacy and health information among young adults and to determine the significant difference of those domains based on selected variables namely, gender, ethnics and study streams. After results being tabulated, futher analysis was done to calculate the number of respondents who has the capacity to make an informed health related decision.In this study, there were 3 different survey items were used. In order to assess level of health literacy, a 36 items survey of Test of Functional Health Literacy for Adult (TOFHLA) was adopted which consisted of two assessment parts, namely reading and numeracy test. The TOFHLA was mainly used by researchers in assessing health literacy level of any population. Thios study had successfully recruited 205 respondents, specifically young adults from a local university in Kelantan.The respondents were consisted of different young adult age groups and were mainly taken from 2 different study streams which were natural science and art and social science. The findings showed a mix result. the majority of the respondents were having high literacy level but of avarage level for self-afificacy and health information understanding. These mix results were futher analyzed in SPSS using cros tabulation and the outcome of cross tabulation test specified that only eight out of 205 respondents were able to make informed health related decisions.