title: "I cried because I didn't know if I could take care of him": toward a taxonomy of interactive and critical health literacy as portrayed by caregivers of children with special health care needs.
abstract: Although the contributions of reading ability and numeracy skills in successful navigation of health-related systems are understood, the skills that comprise interactive and critical health literacy are not fully explicit. Using a phenomenological approach and the conceptual frame of health literacy as an asset, we conducted focus group interviews with 35 caregivers of children who had significant medical needs. Caregiver quotes were coded and categorized and then compared to the Revised Blooms Taxonomy. The purpose of the analysis was to better understand the interactive and critical health literacy skills caregivers use when coordinating their children's care. The findings support a dynamic constructivist perspective of health literacy such that caregiver skill changed relative to the children's health conditions. In addition, a taxonomic code of cognitive and communicative skills emerged from the data. This taxonomy may be useful in developing instrumentation to measure interactive and critical health literacy as well as in identifying a potential foci of interventions aimed at improving interactive and critical health literacy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Occupational Science & Technology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53221, USA. krisb@uwm.edu
authors.forename: Kris
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pizur-Barnekow
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Darragh
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Johnston
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002965:Classification; D003448:Crying; D019988:Children with Disabilities; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D057220:Health Literacy / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D036301:Qualitative Research; D055815:Young Adult