Does where you live influence what you know? Community effects on health knowledge in Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines community effects on health knowledge in a developing country setting. We examine knowledge about the etiology and prevention of child illnesses using a unique 2002 representative survey of communities and households in Ghana. We find that community context matters appreciably, even after adjusting for the anticipated positive effects of an individual's education, literacy, media exposure and household socioeconomic status. The proportion of literate adults and the presence of a market in a community positively influence a person's health knowledge. In other words, even if a person herself is not literate, living in a community with high levels of literacy or a regular market can still positively affect her health knowledge. Our results suggest that social networks and diffusion play a key role in these community effects. In turn, these results offer policy implications for Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa.

Hepatitis B in Ghana's upper west region: A hidden epidemic in need of national policy attention

“…However, poorly communicated health messages may not only result in inaccurate knowledge, but can also be potentially harmful as such misinformation can lead to poor health-seeking practices. The chronic lack of effective health information, communication and education systems as evident from the findings is especially relevant structural condition and policy failure in the context of UWR, where a legacy of low educational attainment means that a large section of the population does not possess a high enough level of health literacy to accurately discern the contents of HBV messages, or be connected to social networks that properly understand and can pass on the correct information (Andrzejewski et al, 2009). In the absence of correct preventive health information, the underlying sociocultural belief system will tend to provide the basis for conceptualizing health issues related to an unknown disease.…”

Social capital and health literacy in Taiwan

“…They suggested that research needs to take into account social support that people can draw on when problems arise due to their health literacy limitations. Other researchers suggested that social networks and diffusion [14,15] played a key role in health knowledge, and social capital [16] dimensions also covariate with health literacy. And it is argued that social capital is a key factor of health literacy.…”

Regional inequality and vaccine uptake: a multilevel analysis of the 2007 Welfare Monitoring Survey in Malawi

“…It is documented that knowledge and discussions about vaccination improve uptake [12]. The relative proportion of literate adults in local communities may also have a general positive effect on the presence of health knowledge in local communities [13]. Literacy not only improves the situation for those that have an education, but might also have an effect on the uptake of vaccines for those that are not literate but live in regions with a relatively high proportion of literacy.…”