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Article
Serving the Needs of the Latina Community for Health Information
Health, Culture and Society (2015)
  • R. A. Yaros
  • J. Roberts
  • E. Powers
  • L. Steiner
Abstract
Latinos remain the largest US population with limited health literacy (Andrulis D.P. & Brach, 2007). Concerned with how local media can meet the information needs of underserved audiences, we interviewed Latinas who were pregnant or mothers of young children living in a Spanish speaking community, and surveyed 33 local health professionals. Findings are that Latina women’s most common source of health information was family and friends. They said they tune to Spanish television and radio programs, but gave low grades to news media for health information. Medical professionals agreed that Latinas generally get their health information through friends and family, and rated the media poorly in terms of serving Latinas’ needs. Since the data indicate that the local news media are not serving Latinas’ health information needs as much as they could, we offer recommendations to potentially exploit new technological affordances and suggest expansion of conventional definitions of health literacy.
Keywords
  • health literacy,
  • Latinas,
  • news media,
  • underserved,
  • health communication
Disciplines
Publication Date
2015
Publisher Statement

This document was originally published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh in Health, Culture and Society. This work is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Details regarding the use of this work can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. doi: 10.5195/hcs.2015.158

Citation Information
R. A. Yaros, J. Roberts, E. Powers and L. Steiner. "Serving the Needs of the Latina Community for Health Information" Health, Culture and Society Vol. 8 Iss. 1 (2015)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jessica_roberts1/1/