En Familia: An intergenerational health literacy program for Latino families

This paper presents the evaluation findings of En Familia (ENF), an intergenerational health literacy program for Latino families. Latinos in the US disproportionately experience health disparities and barriers to accessing care, including lack of culturally appropriate health information and limited knowledge of the US health care system. ENF is a five session bilingual knowledge and health literacy skills building program for implementation with low-income Latino families at Latino-serving community-based organizations. Using engaging, participatory activities, ENF’s goal is to improve families’ ability and confidence to find, use, and understand health care services and information and become effective managers of their health care.

We evaluated ENF using the following research questions: To what extent does participation in ENF increase participants’ positive attitudes, self-efficacy, and health literacy skills to find, use, and understand health care services and information? To what extent does participation in ENF empower and activate participants to find, use, and understand health care services and information and improve family communication on health care topics?

We collected primary quantitative data from 48 Latino families. Each family comprised three generations. We used a pretest/post-test quasi-experimental design to explore the statistical relationship between exposure to the ENF program and dependent variables of the program’s efficacy. Findings suggest ENF increases participants’ positive attitudes, self-efficacy, and health literacy skills. The study findings more broadly indicate that an intergenerational program can improve low-income Latinos families’ sense of empowerment to manage their health care as a family unit.