Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Health literacy addresses a range of social dimensions of health, including knowledge, navigation and communication, as well as individual and organizational skills for accessing, understanding, evaluating and using information. Particularly over the past decade, health literacy has globally become a major public health concern as an asset for promoting health, wellbeing and sustainable development. This comprehensive handbook provides an invaluable overview of current international thinking about health literacy, highlighting cutting edge research, policy and practice in the field. With a diverse team of contributors, the book addresses health literacy across the life-span and offers insights from different populations and settings. Providing a wide range of major findings, the book outlines current discourse in the field and examines necessary future dialogues and new perspectives.

In this anthology of health literacy, drawing on New Social Literacy studies and contemporary debates on equity, we discuss health literacy within German regional and cultural contexts as well as in selected non-European regions, such as in Asia and South America. Topics include unique reviews on health literacy, new empirical results on different population groups, in-depth ethnographic insights into social contexts, interventions intended to improve health literacy, and innovative theoretical dialogs. The discussions within this book provide new ideas and intriguing new results, also shedding light on the explanatory power of the health literacy concept as well as its boundaries.

Dieses Referenzwerk bietet einen umfangreichen Überblick zu den zentralen Themen der Gesundheitskompetenz und richtet sich an Studierende, Dozierende, Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Disziplinen im Gesundheitsbereich sowie an Expertinnen und Experten aus der Praxis. Was ist Gesundheitskompetenz und wie wird sie gemessen? Die Autorinnen und Autoren zeigen neben den konzeptionellen Grundlagen gängige Methoden und Instrumente zur Erfassung der Gesundheitskompetenz bei verschiedenen Altersgruppen und gesundheitlichen Themenfeldern auf. Dabei wird der Blick auf betriebliche und nicht-betriebliche Lebenswelten sowie die Digitalisierung gerichtet. Neben der aktuellen Studienlage und aktuellen Projekten werden Herausforderungen der Zukunft aufgezeigt.