Health beliefs of emerging adults: How colleges may enhance student health literacy and co-produce healthy outcomes

Abstract

Objective: Health literacy is important while attending a residential college where daily decisions can impact one’s physical and mental health and knowing who or what to trust for information is of the utmost importance in claiming more decision-making autonomy. Participants: A total of 189 students at a University in the Northeastern United States participated in this study. Methods: A cross-sectional survey assessment of shared beliefs around health behaviors was conducted. Results: Areas of high consensus center around knowledge of positive health behaviors. Consensus lessens as participants are faced with statements that require more independent thinking, more information, and more subjectivity. Gender differences are also prevalent. Conclusions: Exercising agency is needed when making a commitment to one health choice vs. another. Agency in emerging adulthood has been found to be positively correlated with commitment and deliberate decision-making both of which are needed as college students face independent health choices.

Keywords:

• Beliefs
• college students
• consensus
• emerging adults
• health behaviors

Ethical review and data availability

Ethic Approval was provided by the Franklin Pierce University Institutional Review Board (IRB) # VL101719. The data set obtained through our study is at Franklin Pierce University.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of United States of America and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Franklin Pierce University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by New Hampshire- INBRE (Idea Network for Biomedical Research Excellence) through an Institutional Development Award (IDeA), P20GM103506, from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).