HEALTH INFORMATION LITERACY AMONG RURAL WOMEN OF PANCHKULA DISTRICT OF HARYANA

Abstract

The present study has been conducted to assess the health Information literacy among the Rural women of Panchkula District of Haryana, India. Using selfstructured questionnaire data for the present study was gathered from 71 rural women who were above 18 years of age. Multistage sampling method was adopted to select the sample. The results revealed that rural women have various information needs related to health for which they seek information from ‘Family/ Friends’ as their first source followed by other sources like ‘Health care professionals’ and ‘Social Networking Sites’. It has been identified that most of the rural women are satisfied with the health-related information they get from ‘family/ friends’ with the mean value 4.03 followed by ‘health care professionals’ and ‘SNS’ with the mean value and 2.82 and 2.80 respectively. Further the study has revealed that there is a need to create more awareness regarding Government health related support programmes as 54.9% of rural women are not aware of them.

Keywords: Health Literacy, Information literacy, health information literacy, Rural women, Haryana