Young Norwegians Find Health Information Easily but Struggle to Judge It

Young adults in Northern Norway are generally confident at locating health information online, but they find it considerably harder to judge whether that information is trustworthy, according to a new study drawing on the Fit Futures 3 cohort. The research, based on cross-sectional data collected in 2021–2022 from 538 participants aged 26 to 36 with a median age of 27, measured health literacy with the Norwegian twelve-item HLS-Q12 instrument, which treats finding information and judging it as distinct competencies within the broader health literacy framework. The mean prorated sum score was 37.4 on a scale running from 24 to 48, with a standard deviation of 5.2.

Yet the average conceals a vulnerable minority: 21 percent of participants scored in the two lowest health literacy categories, at or below 33 points. Health literacy scores were not evenly distributed across the cohort. The researchers found significant unadjusted associations with sex (p = .012), educational level (p = .001), childhood financial situation (p = .003), current financial situation (p < .001), and self-reported health (p < .001).

In other words, both socioeconomic circumstances, past and present, and how participants rated their own health tracked with how easily they reported navigating the health information landscape. The study's most striking finding emerged at the level of individual survey items. Perceived difficulty was strongly associated with overall health literacy level across all five selected items, with effect sizes (ε²) ranging from .315 to .464.

Across the cohort, judging health information proved consistently more difficult than finding it, with most comparisons reaching statistical significance at p < .001, although one comparison, between items Q5 and Q7, did not reach significance (p = .074). The single hardest task was judging treatment options, item Q3, which 35.6 percent of participants reported finding difficult. After applying the Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate correction to account for multiple testing, difficulty with Q3 remained associated with self-reported health (p < .001, ε² = .033), and difficulty with item Q7, another judging item, remained associated with educational level (p = .019, ε² = .013).

Sociodemographic patterns were not uniform across tasks. The effect sizes for these item-level sociodemographic associations were small, however, which the authors contrast with the much larger associations between perceived difficulty and overall health literacy level. Taken together, the results suggest that the bottleneck for young adults is not access or search skill but critical appraisal.

Self-reported health showed the largest unadjusted associations with difficulty on the selected items, while socioeconomic variables such as education and financial situation showed smaller and less consistent associations across the specific finding and judging tasks. The consistency of the finding-versus-judging gap across sociodemographic groups indicates that the challenge is broadly shared rather than confined to any single segment of the cohort. The authors conclude that strategies to strengthen health literacy among young adults should prioritize critical appraisal skills, rather than focusing primarily on information-seeking ability.

As a cross-sectional study of one regional Norwegian cohort, the work captures a snapshot at a formative life stage of growing health autonomy and cannot establish causal relationships, but it offers a detailed item-level map of where young adults stumble when they meet the digital health information environment.

Subject of Research: Health literacy and the ability to find and judge health information among young adults in Northern Norway

Article Title: Health literacy levels in young adults in Northern Norway and their ability to find and judge health information: a Fit Futures 3 study

Article References: Stifjell, K., Wien, C., Evensen, E. K., Sandanger, T. M., & Stein, L. (2026). Health literacy levels in young adults in Northern Norway and their ability to find and judge health information: a Fit Futures 3 study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29640-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29640-y

Keywords: health literacy, young adults, Northern Norway, Fit Futures, HLS-Q12, critical appraisal, health information, cross-sectional study, digital health, public health, Health, literacy