Mechanisms of Health Literacy and Information Accessibility in the Deaf

University of Michigan(UM) is the clinical coordinating center (CCC) and data coordinating center (DCC) for this study. There are no subject recruitment or interaction will take place at UM. CCC engages clinicians and the clinical research mission and provides the training and professional development to ensure effective study by recruiting and maintaining the study sites performed at the Hurley Medical Center at Flint, Michigan, The National Technical Institute of Technology(NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and The Sinai Deaf Health(SDH)program in Chicago, Illinois including participates. Thus, educating and training investigators, study coordinators, and other research staff to ensure an ongoing quality improvement of research processes. DCC is highly invested in producing the highest quality survey questionnaires for use with deaf ASL-users and hearing, English speakers. The study team will only use the best possible ASL translations of the data collection measures in order to best obtain accurate, high-quality research.

University of Michigan (UM) will function as the lead site, not as a performance site. UM will oversee all three other sites and conduct quality checks with each site, assist with training of the staff for standardization, and conduct data management/storage of de-identified data along with analysis. Hard copies and identifiers will be maintained at each site as per their approved IRB protocols.

The two primary objectives of this proposal are:

• To elucidate the role of information marginalization on health literacy in Deaf American Sign Language (ASL) users
• To better understand the mechanisms of health literacy in this population so as to identify viable targets for future health literacy intervention development. This proposal is responsive to PAR-10-133's request for studies that assess mechanisms underlying health literacy, including roles of cognition, culture, language fluency, and information-seeking and interpretation ability in the deaf population and, how these may differ from the hearing population.

A secondary objective is to assess how varying levels of hearing loss can affect individuals' abilities to access and comprehend health information and their health literacy adequacy.

Inclusion criteria

Deaf American Sign Language Users:

• deaf persons who use sign language and live in Flint, Michigan, Rochester NY, and Chicago, IL metropolitan areas.

Hearing, English speakers:

• hearing persons who speak fluent English and live in Flint, Michigan, Rochester NY, and Chicago, IL metropolitan areas.

Exclusion criteria

• Those who have cognitive impairment (e.g., due to dementia, delirium or intoxication).
• Those who unable to consent to the study.
• Individuals with limited vision will be excluded if they are unable to effectively use a PC (i.e., function vision at 20-200 or worse).