Category: We Heart Health Literacy

Everyone from teachers to government leaders to parents knows that the right carrot or stick can be a powerful motivator. Want to get an A on that history exam? Study extra hard. Looking to avoid a parking ticket? Feed the meter. Don’t want a timeout? Give your sister a turn with the pirate hat and the plastic sword.

But outside factors aren’t the only forces at play, dear readers — sometimes, we do positive things just because we want to or because it makes us feel good. This natural (or intrinsic) motivation is at the core of self-determination theory.

The gist: When we’re naturally motivated toward a goal, we show more effort and persistence in achieving it — so we’re more likely to be successful.

Intrinsic motivation depends on 3 things that we all crave.

• Autonomy: We want to be in control of our actions
• Competence: We want to be good at stuff
• Relatedness: We want to feel understood and like we belong

Unfortunately, we often feel ambivalent about making positive changes because, let’s face it, many changes (like quitting smoking or overhauling your diet) are really hard. We all need social support to realize our potential.

One great technique for helping people discover their inner motivation is motivational interviewing, a type of clinical counseling that relies on open-ended questions and reflective listening. The goal of motivational interviewing is to help people resolve their ambivalence so they feel ready to move toward a goal.

Of course, when you’re writing health information for the masses, you don’t have the luxury of one-on-one sessions to unlock each user’s inner motivation. But you can still apply the basic principles of self-determination theory to your content by:

• Acknowledging that change is hard
• Making it clear that people have a choice to make a healthy change (or not)
• Giving them specific tips and tools for tackling the new behavior
• Boosting their confidence

Armed with a sense of control, a few useful tools, and some compassion and encouragement, your users will have a much better shot at finding the motivation they need to achieve their goals.

The bottom line: Use self-determination theory to help people discover their inner motivation to make healthy changes.

As you know, dear readers, translation is important. It makes your plain language, audience-centered content more accessible to people who struggle with English or can’t speak it at all. In the United States, that’s about 13 million people, according to the Census Bureau.

But what do we ❤︎ even more than a translated material? A bilingual one.

Despite the English language’s many quirks (Do we really need both “who” and “whom”?), many immigrants and refugees want to learn it. The fact is that knowing English can make life — and things like staying healthy and navigating the health care system in this country — a lot easier.

Bilingual materials (materials that have content in both English and another language) give non-English speakers an opportunity to learn English words they can use to communicate about their health.

Let’s say you hand a Spanish fact sheet on disease symptoms to a Spanish speaker. If you’ve done your job, she’ll read it and walk away knowing what to look out for. Yay! But when she experiences a symptom, will she be able to talk about it in English? Probably not.

With a bilingual material, your reader can read the Spanish word for “fever” and then look for the English equivalent. She’ll collect the words she needs to talk with English-speaking doctors or counselors next week, next year, and beyond.

Of course, with twice as much content, you may quickly find yourself staring at a page crammed with words. Fear not! Make your bilingual material easy to read by following a few design best practices (white space and chunks of content, oh my!).

The bottom line: Consider bilingual materials to help non-English speakers build their English vocabulary and improve communication with providers.

It’s that time again — this week, We ❤ Health Literacy turns 3! And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in our years of spreading the word about health literacy, it’s that we couldn’t do it without you, dear readers. You are absolutely the most committed and passionate fan base of any health literacy newsletter out there (there may not be a lot of competition for that title, but still).

In the coming year, we’ll occasionally be featuring a tried-and-true post from our archives. If you have any suggestions for posts that you think deserve a second go, please let us know! We’d be happy to make sure your favorite post sees another day.

And, in what has become a We ❤ Health Literacy tradition, we’re marking our birthday by sharing 5 of our most popular posts from this year — so check them out, preferably with cake. We’ll definitely be eating cake.

• You Can Do It: Making Negative Messages Positive
• What Star Wars Teaches Us About Health Literacy
• Health Lit Live with Dr. Cynthia Baur
• Things We ❤: CDC’s Everyday Words for Public Health Communication
• Use Zombies to Fight the Passive Voice

P.S. Want to give us a present? It’s easy — just encourage other health literacy geeks to sign up and share in the love!

The bottom line: On our birthday, we send thanks to our readers who make this process so rewarding each week.

It’s summertime, dear readers, and that means it’s time to dive into your summer reading lists! In this edition of the We ❤ Health Literacy Book Club, we’re talking about one of our very favorite books about the intersection of culture and health.

Written by Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the true story of a Hmong toddler named Lia Lee and her immigrant family’s experience in the American health care system. Lia had epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures. But in her family’s culture, epilepsy is known as qaug dab peg, which translates as “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” The Hmong believe that seizures happen when a person’s soul is captured by a spirit.

Lia’s parents chose to work with a shaman to call back her soul, but they also sought treatment at a hospital near their home in Merced, California. Lia’s doctors had trouble communicating with her parents because of a language barrier and a lack of translators. There was also a deep, cross-cultural misunderstanding between the Lee family and her American doctors:

“[Lia’s doctor] had no way of knowing that [her parents] had already diagnosed their daughter’s problem as the illness where the spirit catches you and you fall down. [Lia’s parents] had no way of knowing that [her doctor] had diagnosed it as epilepsy, the most common of all neurological disorders.”

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a moving story that highlights the importance of acknowledging and respecting people’s beliefs as part of their health care — in other words, cultural competence. And thanks in part to this book, cultural competence is now a required lesson in many medical schools.

The bottom line: Read about how people experience health and illness differently based on their culture in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Picture this, dear readers: you sit down at a restaurant. You’re expecting a menu, but the waiter says he already knows what you want and serves you a roast beef sandwich. Never mind that you’re a vegetarian with a desperate craving for tomato soup.

Whether we’re talking about food or health information, the takeaway is the same — when we make assumptions about what other people want or need, we can easily get into trouble.

That’s why human-centered design (HCD) is so important. As you may know, HCD is a method for developing websites and products that involves the target audience as co-creators in every step of the process. HCD allows you to stop guessing about your audience and get reliable information straight from the source.

From there, you’re in a prime position to serve up some soup — or whatever it is that will meet your users’ needs. HCD is a win-win: your users will be satisfied and you won’t waste valuable time, energy, and money making a sandwich that ends up in the trash.

So, when developing any kind of product, follow an HCD process. Here’s one example of how it might play out:

1. Understand user needs. Say you’re thinking about creating an app to help older adults keep track of their medicines. You ask some questions up front and learn that your target audience prefers a paper system to a digital one. Bye-bye, app.
2. Test the product with users. You do some user testing on a budget to look for issues. Participants say they don’t get why it’s a big deal to skip their meds. Now you know you need to address the question, what’s in it for me?
3. Incorporate user feedback to refine your product. You add a strong main message to the beginning of your material that describes the benefits of taking medicines as prescribed. The tool is now clear about the payoff for your users!

The bottom line: Everybody wins when you follow a human-centered design process and create products people actually want.

We send our thoughts to those who lost family and friends in this act of hate. We send our gratitude to those who helped the injured. We send our support to the LGBT community and the Latino community.

Tragedy has a way of reminding us to be better to one another. In honor of the lives that were lost in Orlando, let’s choose to be better, love better, and do better.

Here at We ❤ Health Literacy Headquarters, we talk a lot about adding visuals to health content. This week, we’re talking about a visual element that’s both simple and powerful: the icon.

Icons are simple representations of concepts or actions — visual abbreviations, if you will. They make it really easy to communicate without a lot of words. This, of course, is great for everyone — but it’s especially important for low literacy readers or folks who aren’t entirely comfortable reading the language you’re communicating in.

Icons also help your readers make an immediate visual connection with your health material, which draws them in and gets them itching to learn more.

As you can probably tell, we’re pretty psyched about using icons. We want you on board, too! Here are a few particulars to get you going:

• Keep your icons simple and clear (complex icons can be confusing)
• Use icons to support, but not to replace, your content
• If you use icons for website navigation, also include a clear label (this will help you avoid a hamburger menu icon horror story)
• Use icons to highlight the positive (if you use them to illustrate the negative, your readers could end up doing exactly what you don’t want them to do)
• Test the icons to make sure your audience understands them

Ready to get started? Luckily, you don’t have to create icons from scratch. There are tons of free icons available from the Noun Project and other similar sites.

And just to be super clear: icons and clip art aren’t the same. We urge you, as ever, to skip the clip art.

The bottom line: Use icons to draw your readers in and support your health content.

We’ve talked before, dear readers, about some of the more technical aspects of health communication on the web, like how to make sure your content is accessible. But what if your web content (and your website) exists only in the futuristic ether at the moment?

Welcome to the first installment of a new, occasional series of posts about how to build your own website! Today we’re talking about tools — as in, tools for building a website if you don’t have designers and developers to do it for you. Here are a few free or low-cost options you may want to consider.

• Drupal is a powerful website platform with near-infinite options for functionality. It’s probably more than you need if your website plans are fairly simple (think: a few pages and a blog), but we’re including it here because we like the flexibility it offers.
• Kirby is an up-and-coming platform that’s become a favorite of our developers. It’s a bit more limited than Drupal, but it’s reliable and capable (like a well-built, mid-sized car). You’ll need a wee bit of techie knowledge to get the most out of Kirby, but the simple interface makes it really user friendly. And there’s plenty of room to grow if you want to add a lot more pages or an extra-cool feature (like an interactive map) at some point later on.
• And for the completely non-techie folks out there, WordPress is a solid option. It’s easy for anybody to use because you never have to touch any HTML code, and it makes it pretty simple to customize your site’s look and feel.

So there you have it, dear readers — there are plenty of options to choose from! Now get to building … and stay tuned for more posts about other aspects of creating a website of your very own.

The bottom line: You can build your own health website — with a little help from your friends.

The English language (though beautiful) can be downright confusing sometimes, dear readers. That’s why, in a slight departure from our customary topic of health literacy, our editors have begged and pleaded with us to do a post about one of the most common mistakes we see in health communication: the dreaded “affect” vs. “effect” switch-a-roo.

“Affect” and “effect” are homophones (words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings). Homophones are the English language’s way of keeping us on our toes (think “they’re,” “there,” and “their”), and “affect” vs. “effect” is no exception.

Since we use these terms an awful lot when writing about health, it’s important to keep track of which is which.

Effect is most commonly used as a noun (i.e., a person, place, thing, or idea). It tends to come up when you’re talking about how something impacts your health.

• Health effects of smoking include lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease.

Affect is most commonly used as a verb (i.e., an action word) that means to have an effect on something.

• Smoking cigarettes can negatively affect your health — and lead to health problems like lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease.

So there you have it!

The bottom line: Know the difference between “affect” and “effect” to keep things clear and correct.