2024 Volume 32 Issue 3 Pages 212-219
Health literacy is the ability to “access,” “understand,” “evaluate,” and “make decisions” appropriately based on the necessary health-related information. Literacy is a fundamental human right, much like the right to live one’s own life, and the same is true for health literacy. Compared to people in Europe and other parts of Asia, Japanese people tend to have difficulty with “evaluation” and “decision-making.” Therefore, the challenge is to improve these skills by adopting practices from countries that emphasize the habit of constructive discussion and decision-making from the school education stage.
Research reveals that Japanese high school students are more likely to engage in desirable health behaviors when they can evaluate the reliability of information and make more deliberative, rational decisions. The skills of not only information evaluation, involving the ability to discern evidence and narratives by checking the five points “Ka-Chi-Mo-Na-I,” but also rational decision-making, involving “O-Chi-Ta-Ka” components, which represent options, pros, cons, and values, are necessary. We hope that students beginning to make life choices will have the opportunity to acquire these skills, enabling them to make unique decisions and clarify their own values.
We created a video to promote these two skills and hope that students will use it. We also encourage evaluation studies to determine the effectiveness of their implementation in schools.
