Children's understanding of environmental health risks: The effects of visual aid and age.

Background: Delivering effective health risk communication among adults has been shown to increase access to treatments, improve medication compliance and promote the adoption of healthy behaviors. Little is known about the ability of children to understand health risk information and the format that can be adopted to ease their understanding. Methods: This research consists of two studies. The first study tests two different visual aids specifically designed to give children health risk information. In the second study, children's understanding of environmental health risk information is explored by means of 10 tasks involving different absolute health risk sizes and changes in absolute risk. Results: Both experiments suggest that even the youngest children (7 years of age) understand health risks. The first study results suggest that the visual aid using human figures lead to higher accuracy of gist understanding. The second study confirms the hypothesis that the ability to understand health risk improves with age, particularly after the age of 9. The results also suggest that size of health risk influences the ability of children to grasp risk information. Conclusion: Pictographs with human figures appear a good choice of format to improve gist understanding, however further research is needed to investigate the efficacy of other types of visual aids on gist and verbatim tasks. The age of the child significantly influences understanding.