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Background:
Due to the high availability and use of digital media, health- related information is increasingly shifting into the digital space. While there are increasing empirical findings on general health literacy (HL), there is a lack of evidence on digital HL in adolescence and its association with health behavior. Methods:
A cross-sectional study of 490 secondary school students (grades eight and nine) from the federal state of Hesse was conducted from October 2019 to February 2020. Digital HL was assessed using five subscales of the Digital Health Literacy Instrument (DHLI), while consumption of fruits, vegetables, soft drinks, and weekly physical activity were used as indicators of health behavior. In addition to gender and grade level, subjective social status (SSS) was used as a social characteristic. Univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses were performed, with binary-logistic regression adjusted for gender and SSS.
Results:
Across all items, the percentage of adolescents reporting difficulties in acquiring and dealing with digital health information ranges from 15.3 % to 37.5 %. Stratified by social characteristics, gender and socioeconomic differences were found with girls and respondents reporting a lower SSS more often showing a limited digital HL. Adolescents with moderate and low digital HL report higher levels of low physical activity, non-daily fruit and daily soft drink consumption. Depending on the health behavior, different relationship patterns can be observed for the dimensions of digital HL.
Conclusions:
The findings suggest a need for interventions to promote digital HL among adolescents, particularly for those of low SSS. In this context, the differential relationship patterns with health behaviors provide an avenue for the development of specific interventions.
Research on the development of bullying is often based upon Bronfenbrenner’s socioecological model (Swearer & Hymel, 2015). Thus, various relevant contextual variables have been identified, including classroom climate and school climate (Thornberg et al., 2018; Zych et al., 2019). School climate has been defined in different ways, mostly including relationships between people in the school environment (Wang et al., 2016). Empirically, only the relationships between students (also summarised within the class as classroom climate) and between teachers and pupils are usually considered. However, teachers have been identified as particularly significant in the bullying process and as role models for students (Colpin et al., 2021). Because of this, it is assumed that relationships among teachers can also be significant risk factors for student bullying. In this study, we investigate communication climate among teachers as part of the school climate and its associations to student bullying. In addition, we follow Bronfenbrenner’s idea of interactions among contextual levels by considering both school climate and classroom climate and investigating moderation effects. Data was collected from more than 550 teachers and 2,000 students in 114 classes at 24 schools in Germany. The analyses involved three-level hierarchical binary
regression analyses and cross-level interaction models. Findings suggest that staff communication climate is not associated directly with students’ experiences with bullying, but that the worse
staff communication climate, the more students bully others in classrooms with high rates of rivalry (cross-level moderation). The associations will further be analysed under consideration of relevant control variables. Final results will be presented at the conference. The study broadens the contextual perspective on bullying by including more than one level at once and supports the importance of a whole-school perspective on bullying.