Predicting the Impact of Teachers’ Health Information Literacy Skills on Their Psychological Distress during COVID-19
Abstract
Health information literacy profoundly impacts people's psychological well-being and physical health. Therefore, the study aims to predict the impact of health information literacy skills on psychological distress among college teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and data was collected from 315 college teachers through an e-questionnaire. The research data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and simple linear regression. Each level of health information literacy performs in three domains; healthcare literacy, disease prevention literacy, and health promotion literacy. The respondents exhibited sufficient health information literacy skills. The findings highlighted that healthcare literacy and disease prevention literacy skills are significant predictors of traumatic stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversely, the respondents with sufficient health promotion literacy skills faced more psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of HIL skills level on subscales of psychological distress has not been studied in the current scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is valuable as it investigated the HIL skills and COVID-19 psychological distress among public college teachers. The study's findings have practical guidelines for practice and decision-making for different stakeholders including information professionals, medical librarians, policymakers, teachers, educationists, psychologists, and general health practitioners. Arrangements to enhance health promotion literacy and measures are needed to develop stress-coping strategies for college teachers to respond to uncertain situations.
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