Original title: Adolescents' health literacy and health-related quality of life: The mediating role of self-efficacy
Kristin Sofie Waldum-Grevbo, Solveig Holen, Tore Wentzel-Larsen, Åse Sagatun · August 2026
Helping teenagers feel good and stay healthy is a major goal in public health. Health literacy means knowing how to find, understand, and use health information. Self-efficacy means believing in your own ability to handle tasks and challenges. Scientists wanted to see how these two things affect a teenager's health-related quality of life, which is their overall physical and mental well-being. Researchers surveyed thirteen-year-olds in Norway to find out. In theory, having good health literacy helps teens manage everyday health situations. That success strengthens their confidence in themselves, which then boosts their quality of life. The researchers found that higher health literacy directly linked to a better quality of life across every area measured, with the strongest boost seen in how teens felt about their school environment. Furthermore, teen self-efficacy explained between 30% and 76% of this positive link.
Imagine you are learning to cook a new dish. Just having the recipe (health literacy) does not guarantee a good meal. What really matters is whether you believe you can follow the steps—like chopping vegetables without cutting yourself. If you feel confident, you try harder and the meal turns out better. In this paper, the recipe is health literacy, the confidence is self-efficacy, and the quality of the meal is the teen's quality of life.
For teenagers, feeling healthy isn't just about knowing facts—it's about believing they can act on them. This study shows that health literacy boosts quality of life mostly by strengthening self-efficacy, the confidence to manage health situations. That means schools and programs should focus on building teens' belief in their own abilities, not just teaching health information.
The abstract notes this is a cross-sectional design, so it cannot prove that health literacy causes changes in self-efficacy or HRQoL—only that they are associated. The study also relies on self-report data from a single country (Norway) and a specific age group (13-year-olds), so results may not generalize to other cultures or ages. The mediation analysis estimates potential effects but does not establish temporal ordering.
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Adolescents' health literacy and health-related quality of life: The mediating role of self-efficacy — Kristin Sofie Waldum-Grevbo, Solveig Holen, Tore Wentzel-Larsen et al. — Public health in practice (Oxford, England) — doi:10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100849
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.