Exploring the dimensions of oral health literacy

Objectives: To make evidence-based recommendations for appropriate intervention programmes in oral health literacy, we first need to understand the dimensions of the issue. Methods: This project is developing locally-relevant oral health literacy assessment tools in Chinese and English for testing with the general population. It will build a corpus of key terms from existing spoken, print and multimedia resources. Additionally, clinical assessments, trialling of assessment tools, and interviews by psychology researchers will determine the relationship between oral health status and management, conceptual development and oral health literacy. Results: Our project hypothesis is that there will be a significant correlation between oral health literacy standards of parents and the oral health status of their pre-school children. Additionally, we hypothesise that pre-school children will have little conceptual understanding of oral health management; their knowledge is likely to be limited to the common “Do's and Don'ts” such as “Brush you teeth” and “Don't eat so much candy.” Conclusions: We believe that the integration of conceptual development with current oral health notions of ‘literacy' into a multi-dimensional framework for ‘oral health literacy' will move the field forward from early functionalist approaches. Also, we believe that information gathered in testing these hypotheses will inform understandings as to what constitutes oral health literacy in Hong Kong. This research will, therefore, inform the types of oral health literacy interventions required in the future.