The influence of text characteristics on perceived and actual difficulty of health information
The influence of text characteristics on perceived and actual difficulty of health information
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DOI：
10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2010.02.002
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发表时间：
2010-06-01
影响因子：
4.9
通讯作者：
Cowie, James R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Leroy, Gondy;Helmreich, Stephen;Cowie, James R.
目的：从文字健康信息中学习的意愿和能力对于人们了解情况和做出更好的医疗决定至关重要。这两个用户特征受到文本感知难度和实际难度的影响。我们的目标是找到能够指示感知和实际难度的文本特征，从而降低阅读障碍，增加对信息的理解。方法：我们系统地处理了三个文本特征，即整体句子结构（主动、被动、外显主语或句子主语）、名词短语复杂性（简单或复杂）和功能词密度（高或低），它们是比常用的可读性公式更精细的文本评估指标。我们通过让消费者选择一个句子的最简单和最难的版本来衡量每个句子的感知难度。我们通过提出多项选择题来衡量整个段落的实际难度，以衡量段落的简单和困难版本的理解和保留信息。结果：基于对86名参与者的研究，我们发现低名词短语复杂性和高虚词密度导致句子被认为更简单。在被动句、句主句和附加句主句中，主效应和交互效应均显著（p < 0.05）。在主动句中，只有名词短语复杂程度有影响（p < 0.001）。对于同一组参与者，基于这三种语言特征的整个段落的简化对理解只有很小的影响（p = 0.99），对信息的保留没有影响。结论：使用语法文本特征可以衡量和提高文本的感知难度。与基于可读性公式的期望相反，这些语法操作对实际难度的影响有限，因此不足以简化文本和提高理解。未来的工作将包括语义测量和整体文本组成及其对感知和实际难度的影响。局限性：这些结果仅限于文本的语法特征。这些研究也只使用了一个任务，一个问答任务，来衡量对信息的理解。2010爱思唯尔爱尔兰有限公司版权所有。
Purpose: Willingness and ability to learn from health information in text are crucial for people to be informed and make better medical decisions. These two user characteristics are influenced by the perceived and actual difficulty of text. Our goal is to find text features that are indicative of perceived and actual difficulty so that barriers to reading can be lowered and understanding of information increased.Methods: We systematically manipulated three text characteristics, - overall sentence structure (active, passive, extraposed-subject, or sentential-subject), noun phrases complexity (simple or complex), and function word density (high or low), - which are more fine-grained metrics to evaluate text than the commonly used readability formulas. We measured perceived difficulty with individual sentences by asking consumers to choose the easiest and most difficult version of a sentence. We measured actual difficulty with entire paragraphs by posing multiple-choice questions to measure understanding and retention of information in easy and difficult versions of the paragraphs.Results: Based on a study with 86 participants, we found that low noun phrase complexity and high function words density lead to sentences being perceived as simpler. In the sentences with passive, sentential-subject, or extraposed-subject sentences, both main and interaction effects were significant (all p < .05). In active sentences, only noun phrase complexity mattered (p < .001). For the same group of participants, simplification of entire paragraphs based on these three linguistic features had only a small effect on understanding (p = .99) and no effect on retention of information.Conclusions: Using grammatical text features, we could measure and improve the perceived difficulty of text. In contrast to expectations based on readability formulas, these grammatical manipulations had limited effects on actual difficulty and so were insufficient to simplify the text and improve understanding. Future work will include semantic measures and overall text composition and their effects on perceived and actual difficulty.Limitations: These results are limited to grammatical features of text. The studies also used only one task, a question-answering task, to measure understanding of information. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.