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Improving Environmental Health Literacy and Justice through Environmental Exposure Results Communication

Understanding the short-and long-term impacts of a biomonitoring and exposure project and reporting personal results back to study participants is critical for guiding future efforts, especially in the context of environmental justice. The purpose of this study was to evaluate learning outcomes from environmental communication efforts and whether environmental health literacy goals were met in an environmental justice community. We conducted 14 interviews with parents who had participated in the University of Arizona's Metals Exposure Study in Homes and analyzed their responses using NVivo, a qualitative data management and analysis program. Key findings were that participants used the data to cope with their challenging circumstances, the majority of participants described changing their families' household behaviors, and participants reported specific interventions to reduce family exposures. The strength of this study is that it provides insight into what people learn and gain from such results communication efforts, what participants want to know, and what type of additional information participants need to advance their environmental health literacy. This information can help improve future report back efforts and advance environmental health and justice.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/621420
Date08 July 2016
CreatorsRamirez-Andreotta, Monica, Brody, Julia, Lothrop, Nathan, Loh, Miranda, Beamer, Paloma, Brown, Phil
ContributorsUniv Arizona, Dept Soil Water & Environm Sci, Univ Arizona, Mel & Enid Zuckerman Coll Publ Hlth
PublisherMDPI AG
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle
RightsThis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
Relationhttp://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/7/690

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