Abstract:
The purposes of this study were to 1) investigate the characteristics of research on health literacy (HL) in dietary supplement use (DSU) and compare HL among working-age groups and 2) investigate the causal model and effected size of HL in DSU and sufficiency health behavior. This study was divided in 2 phase: Phase 1 Studied by reviewing related research between 2011 and 2021 in PubMed, SCOPUS, ClinicalKey, Google Scholar and ThaiJO. Twenty-five articles that met the inclusion criteria were selected for study and analyzed using Cohen’s d. Phase 2 Studied by SEM with the sample group 696 working Thai adults aged 20-59 years by cluster random sampling. The data collected by 5 rating scale questionnaires with alpha coefficient 0.93-0.96 and analyzed by SEM
The results in phase 1: showed that HL affected dietary supplement (DS) consumption behavior among working-age groups with an average effect size of 0.423 (95% CI = 0.249-0.598), followed by disclosure of DSU with an average effect size of 0.220 (95% CI = 0.087-0.353). No effect was found on awareness of dietary supplement advertisements. The discovery of such knowledge is a significant contribution to public health, leading to the development of interventions and policies for enhancing HL in DSU e.g. organizing knowledge-sharing workshops on DSU and building support networks across all sectors. The results in phase 2 found that the causal relationship model had consistency with the empirical data acceptable, 2) social support, awareness of dietary supplement advertisements, HL in DSU had directly affected to sufficiency health behavior (beta = 0.33, 0.20 and 0.13 respectively, P< 0.05). The all factors could predict sufficiency health behavior 34%. And 3) the social support, and awareness of dietary supplement advertisements had directly affected to HL in DSU (beta = 0.36, and 0.57 respectively, P< 0.05), and the 2 factors could predict HL in DSU equal 67%.
