Rural Women’s Comprehension of <i>Hablamos Juntos</i> Universal Symbols of Healthcare

Abstract

Much research attention on Health Information Literacy (HIL) has been on textual sources of information with limited studies on understanding how individuals comprehend information presented in the non-textual forms. This paper presents the results of a study on rural women’s comprehension of Hablamos Juntos (HJ) universal symbols of healthcare. The study was carried out in the Lake Zone regions of Tanzania. The survey results obtained suggest that majority of women had a low level of HJ symbols comprehension. The study’s results on clinical and medical (CM) services symbols matching test partly confirm women’s low level of comprehension observed in the survey. Overall, a total of 19 out of 32 CM symbols were not identified at all. In fact, the few symbols mostly comprehended by the women were those the respondents were familiar to. Taken together, these results seem to suggest that low comprehensibility of HJ clinical and medical symbols demonstrated by women in this study is partly due to low levels of education and symbols’ traits particularly, familiarity, resemblance, and simplicity. These results can be used as baseline information in a survey for developing healthcare symbols in Tanzania.