Beyond readability: investigating coherence of clinical text for consumers.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A basic tenet of consumer health informatics is that understandable health resources empower the public. Text comprehension holds great promise for helping to characterize consumer problems in understanding health texts. The need for efficient ways to assess consumer-oriented health texts and the availability of computationally supported tools led us to explore the effect of various text characteristics on readers' understanding of health texts, as well as to develop novel approaches to assessing these characteristics.

Objective

The goal of this study was to compare the impact of two different approaches to enhancing readability, and three interventions, on individuals' comprehension of short, complex passages of health text.

Methods

Participants were 80 un

SUBMITTER: Smith CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3278090 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature