oa Gezondheidsvoorlichting over alcohol en tabak aan laaggeletterde adolescenten, in het bijzonder de rol van connectieven

Health education about alcohol and tobacco use for low literate adolescents: the role of connectives

This paper first overviews the results of eight experiments that examined the effects of school health communication about alcohol and tobacco on low educated adolescents. Overall, it was found that there was a short term knowledge increase but only among adolescents with less knowledge. Also, the attitude became more negative towards alcohol among adolescents who were more positive towards alcohol at baseline. All of these effects disappeared within a month. There were no effects on intention. Importantly, the format of the health communication did not matter. Results were largely identical for print and audiovisual versions, as well as for informational and narrative versions. Adding testimonials of adolescents to the print and audiovisual informational formats did not make a difference.

The second part of this paper focuses on a ninth experiment that tested the effects of connectives in alcohol health education. Studies on school education texts suggested that texts are easier interpretable if sentences are linked by connectives, but so far this has not been tested on health education texts for low educated adolescents. Overall, we found no differential effects on knowledge, attitude, and intention between a condition with connectives and a condition without connectives.