Open Access

Anja Alexandra Schulz, Markus A. Wirtz

• Abstract: Background : Parents of infants need to be able to access valid health information to preventively protect their infants’ health development. Aims : To investigate the self-assessed literacy of parent couples in accessing information on general health, COVID-19 infection (COVID-19-IP), and early childhood allergy prevention (ECAP). To determine the dependence of the psychometric properties of the access items of the European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q47) on domain and gender. Method : N  = 128 mothers and fathers of infants answered the 12 access items of the HLS-EU-Q47 in the original version and in COVID-19-IP and ECAP versions. Variance decomposition of the repeated measures 2 × 3 × 12-data was conducted. Results : Within the parent couples the individual Access items correlate at most weakly for COVID-19-IP ( r  = .081–.180), moderately for General Health ( r  = .096–.315), and partially highly for ECAP ( r  = .179–.499). While there is no main effect of gender, self-assessed access literacy is generally highest for COVID-19-IP (variance component domain: 24.6%). For the two items on support, however, the highest approval ratings are obtained for general health (variance component domain × item: 13.5%). Limitations : Self-assessments are at most proxy indicators of the actual performance disposition. Conclusions : Health-literate Access to health information does not differ between mothers and fathers, although substantial concordance within couples exists only for ECAP and marked differences are evident between health domains. The validity of self-reported data on parents’ health literacy (HL) can be significantly improved by analyzing the concordance within couples for specific health domains and by focusing on specific facets of the multidimensional HL construct.