Children and young people constitute a core target group for health literacy research and practice: during childhood and youth, fundamental cognitive, physical and emotional development processes ...take place and health-related behaviours and skills develop. However, there is limited knowledge and academic consensus regarding the abilities and knowledge a child or young person should possess for making sound health decisions. The research presented in this review addresses this gap by providing an overview and synthesis of current understandings of health literacy in childhood and youth. Furthermore, the authors aim to understand to what extent available models capture the unique needs and characteristics of children and young people.
Six databases were systematically searched with relevant search terms in English and German. Of the n = 1492 publications identified, N = 1021 entered the abstract screening and N = 340 full-texts were screened for eligibility. A total of 30 articles, which defined or conceptualized generic health literacy for a target population of 18 years or younger, were selected for a four-step inductive content analysis.
The systematic review of the literature identified 12 definitions and 21 models that have been specifically developed for children and young people. In the literature, health literacy in children and young people is described as comprising variable sets of key dimensions, each appearing as a cluster of related abilities, skills, commitments, and knowledge that enable a person to approach health information competently and effectively and to derive at health-promoting decisions and actions.
Identified definitions and models are very heterogeneous, depicting health literacy as multidimensional, complex construct. Moreover, health literacy is conceptualized as an action competence, with a strong focus on personal attributes, while also recognising its interrelatedness with social and contextual determinants. Life phase specificities are mainly considered from a cognitive and developmental perspective, leaving children's and young people's specific needs, vulnerabilities, and social structures poorly incorporated within most models. While a critical number of definitions and models were identified for youth or secondary school students, similar findings are lacking for children under the age of ten or within a primary school context.
Health literacy is an important health promotion concern and recently children and adolescents have been the focus of increased academic attention. To assess the health literacy of this population, ...researchers have been focussing on developing instruments to measure their health literacy. Compared to the wider availability of instruments for adults, only a few tools are known for younger age groups. The objective of this study is to systematically review the field of generic child and adolescent health literacy measurement instruments that are currently available.
A systematic literature search was undertaken in five databases (PubMed, CINAHL, PsycNET, ERIC, and FIS) on articles published between January 1990 and July 2015, addressing children and adolescents ≤18 years old. Eligible articles were analysed, data was extracted, and synthesised according to review objectives.
Fifteen generic health literacy measurement instruments for children and adolescents were identified. All, except two, are self-administered instruments. Seven are objective measures (performance-based tests), seven are subjective measures (self-reporting), and one uses a mixed-method measurement. Most instruments applied a broad and multidimensional understanding of health literacy. The instruments were developed in eight different countries, with most tools originating in the United States (n = 6). Among the instruments, 31 different components related to health literacy were identified. Accordingly, the studies exhibit a variety of implicit or explicit conceptual and operational definitions, and most instruments have been used in schools and other educational contexts. While the youngest age group studied was 7-year-old children within a parent-child study, there is only one instrument specifically designed for primary school children and none for early years.
Despite the reported paucity of health literacy research involving children and adolescents, an unexpected number of health literacy measurement studies in children's populations was found. Most instruments tend to measure their own specific understanding of health literacy and not all provide sufficient conceptual information. To advance health literacy instruments, a much more standardised approach is necessary including improved reporting on the development and validation processes. Further research is required to improve health literacy instruments for children and adolescents and to provide knowledge to inform effective interventions.
Il mio Carso
and
Der Steppenwolf
both portray drinking scenes that make their protagonists reconsider their standing in relation to an increasingly fragmented modern world. Using Hubbard's ...‘intoxicated geographies’ as an interpretative hinge, this article charts the effects of this embodied experience on the two texts. In both, the drinking lens functions as a revelatory device which highlights the transcendent liminality of modernist consciousness in various ways. By blurring the boundaries of social interaction, muddling awareness of time, and complicating notions of consciousness, the two drinking scenes allow a widening of perception that demands an analogous narrative repositioning in response.
This study explores children's perceptions of risk and mobile phones in their everyday lives. Technological developments associated with capitalist society are entwined with the risk discourse, but ...little account has previously been taken of children's views in social analyses of risk. Based on the accounts of thirty young people in the UK aged between 11 – 17 this study adopts a social constructivist perspective to offer a theoretical framework which explores how children themselves actually use mobile phone technologies and understand and manage risk in their everyday lives.Implications of risk and mobile phones are reflected in current media discourse and contemporary public discussions. This research explores the relationship between young people's use of mobile phone technology and the wider theoretical debates about risk, technology and subjectivity. It provides insight into the social aspects of risk and mobile phones in contemporary childhoods.The children in the research were reflexive in their understanding of risk and mobile phones and actively managed risk through their mobile phone use. Their accounts highlight the complex, multifarious relationships of the heterogeneous networks of the technical, the social and the natural that constitute children's everyday lives.
Online abuse, facilitated via social media and mobile technologies, has recently attracted considerable academic attention. The nonconsensual sharing of intimate images—revenge pornography—can have a ...devastating effect on victims, is a global problem, and constitutes interpersonal violence. The national helpline in the United Kingdom has now received over 7,000 calls. In the United Kingdom, new legislation making revenge pornography a crime was introduced in 2014, yet the police do not always respond appropriately to victims. This article presents the findings of a national online survey of police understanding of revenge pornography, undertaken in the United Kingdom in March 2017. The study set out to investigate police knowledge of revenge pornography legislation, their confidence in responding to cases of revenge pornography, and what level of training they had received. A total of 783 members of the police force responded to the survey and, to the authors’ knowledge, this the first study to seek to quantify the understanding of revenge pornography by police officers and staff in England and Wales. The findings suggest that the police in the United Kingdom have a limited understanding of revenge pornography legislation and lack confidence both in investigating cases and in effectively responding to victims. The implications of the study demonstrate that there is an urgent need for training across police forces to ensure that cases of revenge pornography are appropriately responded to, victims are safeguarded, and offenders brought to justice.
As a circulating commodity, sugar holds heavy histories of violence and exploitation that connect up map points of the former British Empire in ways that place time firmly out of joint. This article ...suggests how persistent visual traces of these sugar remainders can contribute to contemporary reckonings with the past time of empire. Working in the interval between commemoration and ruination, it shows how Kara Walker's A Subtlety (2014) has informed how contemporary artists and performers in Scotland engage with sugar histories in their practice. Alberta Whittle, Kayus Bankole, and Adura Onashile all figure sugar time as both continual and contemporary, linking histories of empire and post-industrial memories with artistic and activist expressions in the present. Their works respond to the violence of history in what Saidiya Hartman has termed "aesthetic mode", leading to the formation of creative and critical practices that people can enact to untangle themselves from the sedimented pain of imperial pasts.
This article identifies a set of precarious, temporary, and travelling forms of commemoration that have been expressed in recent public artworks connected to Italy, and proposes them as case studies ...that together can enhance our understanding of how transnational memory is formed and functions across borders. These complex processes of memory-making are illustrated through a comparative analysis of Wes Anderson's Bar Luce (2015), Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument (2013), and Muna Mussie's Oblio (2021). The selected works, which together add transnational nuance to James E. Young's concept of the 'counter-monument', enshrine the creativity which can reside in acts of forgetting and misremembering, in experiencing things second-hand or at a distance, and in re-materialising memory through tropes of ephemerality, portability, and dislocation.
This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, "Italy" has also become increasingly ...detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of "looking sideways" at literary representations of Italy from "outside" the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić's Trieste, Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci's Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere.
This article explores children’s use of mobile phones in relation to their intimate, sexual relationships and in their development of gendered sexual identities in their everyday lives. Implications ...of risk and mobile phones are reflected in current media discourse and contemporary public discussions. While the concept of risk remains at the centre of current sociological debate, children have only recently been seen as active social actors within social science. Based on the accounts of 30 young people aged between 11 and 17, the article adopts a social constructivist perspective to explore the relationship between young people’s talk of sexuality and sexual acts in their discussions of mobile phone use, within the wider theoretical debates about risk and self-identity.
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