About the data sources

Health literacy data at the provincial, territorial and health region levels:
The health-literacy data were estimated from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (IALSS) conducted by Statistics Canada and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Statistics Canada information is used with the permission of Statistics Canada. Users are forbidden to copy this material and/or re-disseminate the data, in an original or modified form, for commercial purposes, without the expressed permission of Statistics Canada. Information on the availability of the wide range of data from Statistics Canada can be obtained from Statistics Canada's Regional Offices, its website at www.statcan.ca and its toll-free access number 1-800-263-1136.

Health literacy data at the community levels:
The data for the local area maps is from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (IALSS) conducted by Statistics Canada and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the 2001 Canadian Census. The maps were produced using a mapping technique developed by the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy (CRISP). The CRISP mapping technique estimates a score on an outcome variable for all Canadian citizens, based on the best available information for each individual, and then displays the resulting scores on provincial or local area maps.

The approach uses the 2001 Canadian census data to create a file for each province that includes a “pseudo-record” for every individual in the province, based on the distribution of people by gender and age in each dissemination area (DA). An estimate of a person’s outcome (in this case their health-literacy score) for all people in the pseudo-record file is estimated using multilevel multiple regression techniques, based on the following data:

a. information at the individual level from a Statistics Canada survey (in this case the IALSS) about how well other people of the same age and gender scored in the person’s DA, and in other DAs in their local area (out to three levels of contiguity), and

b. information at the DA level on the average outcome scores and the demographic characteristics of all DAs in the province. For each estimate we add an error term based on the regression results of the multilevel model. Results are then aggregated to the DA level and used for mapping.

Please contact CCL for more detailed information on the methodology.