Typical Health Beliefs, Coping Strategies and Health Literacy in Healthy Children and Adolescents What Can We Learn from Normative Data?

Health literacy plays a crucial role for pediatric patients and means understanding, maintaining and improving health or illness. An adapted version of the health literacy scale was used to assess health beliefs and coping strategies of 197 highly healthy children and adolescents and their parents. The results show high assessments on the part of the parents and social restrictions (90.1 %) in the event of illness in most children. Using the biopsychosocial model, various dimensions of health literacy were identified (out of 283 associations mentioned, 61.5 % were assigned to the biological dimension, 16.6 % to the psychological dimension and 21.9 % to the social dimension), providing important insights for the development of targeted psychosocial interventions.