Published reports on the use of the Appraisal of Self-care Agency (ASA) Scale among Chinese people are scarce, the procedure of testing the ASA Scale is thus necessary before it is used clinically on Chinese population. The objective of this study was to test the validity and reliability of the ASA Scale on the Chinese population. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted in testing the Scale. A panel of 4 experts was invited to examine the content of the Scale and 128 elderly peoplefrom 3 elderly centers in Hong Kong were employed to examine its construct validity. Item analysis was conducted using Cronbach's Alpha coefficient to examine the reliability of the Scale. Content validity index of 0.88 was achieved resultingfrom the assessment of the 4 experts. Sevenfactors were extracted from the factor analysis representing approximately 70% of variance. The reliability coefficient for the entire Scale was 0.72. It was evident that the ASA Scale was a valid and reliable research instrumer that can be used in the Chinese communities.

This study employed the Delphi technique to define the meaning of health literacy to children and to investigate possible ways lead to them to become health literate. According to the experts' perspectives, the meaning of health literacy to children is "to perform physical and psycho-social activities with appropriate standards; being able to interact with people; cope with necessary changes and demand reasonable autonomy so as to achieve complete physical, mental and social well-being". In order to assist children develop healthy physical, psycho-social well-being so as to demonstrate that they are health literate, parents, teachers and significant others have to support and guide the children by demonstrating good practices regarding health-related behaviors. The study serves as a reference for developing healthy childhood that leads to healthy adulthood and healthy elderly.

To promote the healthy development of children and adolescents, child health professionals need to implement effective health promotion strategies including anti-drug programmes. The instrument that was developed in this study will hopefully contribute to the development of more effective and evidence-based anti-drug programmes for youths.

Early adolescence is a period of rapid cognitive, social, emotional and physical changes. During this period, early adolescents usually lack the ability to cope when they experience stress, which is usually family and school-related. If they cannot cope with such stress, they may fail to develop in a healthy manner and may develop habits harmful to their health such as substance abuse. To enhance positive behaviour in those in early adolescence coping with stress, a school-based project was implemented using focus group interviews, an open forum and follow-up interviews and journals. The objectives were to identify the stressors encountered by the students and their ability to cope, to develop and implement an educational activity to promote positive coping behaviour and to evaluate the effectiveness of the educational activity. The findings of the evaluation support the view that an early prevention programme for promoting positive coping behaviour to early adolescents is useful.

Chinese and Western medicines are both consumed by citizens in Hong Kong. Safe medication practice, however, whether or not it is conducted by Hong Kong citizens, remains unknown. A data collecting tool was developed to explore the consuming patterns of medicines adopted by Hong Kong citizens. It is hoped that by using this tool, baseline information about the ways in which Hong Kong citizens consume their medicines can be explored. It is also hoped that the information will contribute to the educational planning of community-based safe medication practice. The objectives of this paper were thus to report the development of this data collecting tool and to discuss the use of the tool for the promotion of community-based safe medication practice.