Effects of Intervention in Whatsapp and Facebook Groups to Improve Women’s Literacy on Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention

Objective: This work analyzed how health education delivered by online social networks Facebook and WhatsApp can improve women's knowledge about breast and cervical cancer prevention. Methods: The evaluation of these digital platforms' efficacy in health information delivery (over three weeks) was analyzed through a specific instrument before and after an educational intervention. The instrument consisted of five tests on reading, familiarity, understanding, numbering/mathematics, and dialog domains, and measured women's literacy in breast and cervical cancer prevention. Results: The instrument first application revealed a high percentage of correct answers in the reading and familiarity domains, which in turn were higher than the correct answers in the comprehension domain. The first evaluation revealed low performance of the participants in the dialogue and mathematics domains. After the educational intervention, the second instrument application demonstrated an improvement in the reading and familiarity domains; however, there was no significant improvement in the comprehension skill. In the dialogue domain, it was observed an evolution of the percentage of correct answers however this chance did not reach a significant level. There was a worsening in 50% of the items of the mathematics domain evaluated after the intervention. Conclusion: The educational strategy used in this work did not improve the participants' understanding of the developed theme, regardless of the digital platform used to disseminate this information. Our data suggest that the expansion of comprehension, an essential domain for the change of attitude, does not occur in a relative and correlated way with the improvement of reading and familiarity.