Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
The proliferation of health information has created a rich field of resources
that many lay people can use to make informed health care decisions.
For a large segment of the population, these resources will go unseen
and unused because they are written at a level that exceeds their reading
recognition and comprehension skills. The study discussed in this article
assessed the readability of information on six adult and two juvenile diseases
in ten medical textbooks. Students in two library and information science
(LIS) schools read the same information and indicated the words they
did not understand. Results showed that the medical material is written
well above the average person???s reading ability. Words the students could
not understand included anatomical and disease-related terms and drug
names. More research needs to be done on lay people???s comprehension
of medical information.published or submitted for publicatio
