Table 3. Spearman’s correlation between health literacy indices and covariables.

	HL overall	Access	Understand	Appraise	Apply
Sex	0.041*	−0.002	0.037	0.062**	0.019
Age	−0.073**	−0.098**	−0.124**	0.017	−0.068**
Social status	0.239**	0.243**	0.220**	0.172**	0.196**
Literacy	0.201**	0.190**	0.238**	0.145**	0.115**
Level of education	0.231**	0.243**	0.258**	0.167**	0.123**
Financial deprivation	−0.213**	−0.202**	−0.202**	−0.156**	−0.182**
Migration background	−0.045*	−0.038	−0.031	−0.014	−0.055**
Multiple chronic diseases	−0.100**	−0.105**	−0.088**	−0.033	−0.147**
One chronic disease	0.020	0.027	0.017	0.015	0.017

This table shows the relationships between sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents and their health literacy. Based on the unweighted sample, the statistical relationships were calculated using Spearmen’s correlation coefficient. Correlation coefficients can take values from --1 to 1, expressing the direction and strength of the relationship between the variables. As can be seen, the coefficients are quite low which means that the correlations are only weak.

Specifically, the following correlations were found:

• Sex (1 = male, 2 = female). The positive values mean that women have almost consistently higher health literacy scores than men. Access to health-related information is the only deviation from this.

• Age (in years) The almost consistently negative values mean that health literacy decreases with increasing age. The only deviation from this is in the appraise step.

• Social status (self-assessed position in society; 1 = low to 10 = high): The positive values mean that with increasing self-assessed social status, health literacy also increases.

• Level of education (ISCED-11: 0 [primary school not finished] to 8 [doctorate]): The positive values mean that with increasing level of education, health literacy also increases.

• Financial deprivation (0–3 reported difficulties with paying for medicines, medical treatment and monthly bills): The negative values mean that with increasing difficulties with paying for medicines, medical examinations and monthly bills, health literacy decreases.

• Migration background (0 = no, 1 = yes): The negative values mean that persons with migration background have lower health literacy.

• One or more chronic diseases (dummy variable; reference group: no chronic disease): The negative values mean that persons with multiple chronic diseases have lower health literacy compared to persons without or with only one chronic disease.

HL, health literacy; ISCED-11, 2011 International Standard Classification of Education; * p<0.05; ** p<0.01