Health literacy and its effect on chronic disease prevention: evidence from China’s data

BMC Public Health

Table 1 Summary statistics

Sample	All				Rural	Urban	Rural vs Urban
Number of Observations	N = 8194				n = 4192	n = 4002	Rural vs Urban
Variables	mean	s.d.	min/max		mean	mean	p-value
Key variables of interest
Any chronic diseases (=1)	0.261	0.439	0	1	0.293	0.227	0.000
Hypertension (=1)	0.189	0.392	0	1	0.215	0.162	0.000
Heart problems (=1)	0.019	0.138	0	1	0.021	0.018	0.322
Cerebrovascular disease (=1)	0.007	0.082	0	1	0.008	0.006	0.243
Diabetes (=1)	0.049	0.215	0	1	0.055	0.042	0.007
Cancer (=1)	0.007	0.086	0	1	0.009	0.006	0.218
Other chronic diseases (=1)	0.036	0.186	0	1	0.040	0.032	0.074
Adequate health literacy on CDP^a (=1)	0.258	0.438	0	1	0.231	0.286	0.000
Demographics
Region (=1 urban)	0.488	0.500	0	1	0.000	1.000	0.000
Has local hukou (=1)	0.928	0.259	0	1	0.965	0.890	0.000
Gender (=1 male)	0.489	0.500	0	1	0.493	0.484	0.424
Age in years	48.925	13.242	15	69	51.372	46.363	0.000
1:Aged 15–44	0.342	0.474	0	1	0.245	0.443	0.000
2:Aged 45–59	0.389	0.488	0	1	0.430	0.347	0.000
3:Aged 60–69	0.269	0.443	0	1	0.325	0.210	0.000
Household size	2.825	1.520	1	50	2.877	2.771	0.002
Annual income (1000 CNY)	86.552	103.176	0	3500	71.462	102.359	0.000
Education level
1:Illiterate	0.086	0.281	0	1	0.132	0.038	0.000
2:Elementary	0.274	0.446	0	1	0.364	0.179	0.000
3:Middle school	0.300	0.458	0	1	0.309	0.291	0.067
4:High school	0.168	0.374	0	1	0.117	0.222	0.000
5:College or above	0.172	0.377	0	1	0.078	0.270	0.000
Occupation
1:Working in public sectors	0.093	0.290	0	1	0.061	0.127	0.000
2:Farmers	0.289	0.453	0	1	0.449	0.121	0.000
3:Manual labourers	0.184	0.388	0	1	0.191	0.177	0.117
4:Working in private sectors	0.172	0.378	0	1	0.094	0.254	0.000
5:Other	0.262	0.440	0	1	0.206	0.321	0.000

Note: The p-value is calculated using either the t-test (if continuous) or the proportion test (if binary); a pre-test of equality of variance is also conducted. ^a CDP refers to chronic disease prevention

ISSN: 1471-2458