ArticleAustralian and New Zealand journal of public health2021
Communications in the time of a pandemic: the readability of documents for public consumption.
Article in Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Readability of health research informed consent forms: case of the National Health Research Ethics Committee in Tanzania.BMC medical ethics · 2025Article
- What do clinical practice guidelines say about deprescribing? A scoping review.BMJ quality & safety · 2024Article
- Reverse Osmosis Membrane Engineering: Multidirectional Analysis Using Bibliometric, Machine Learning, Data, and Text Mining Approaches.Membranes · 2024Article
- Evaluation of online text-based information resources of gynaecological cancer symptoms.Cancer medicine · 2024Article
- Readability and beyond - Health literacy and numeracy and COVID-19 communications in early childhood education: Are we communicating effectively?Patient education and counseling · 2023Article
- Article
- Exploring the lived experience of families with a COVID-19 positive child: The journey from a critical grounded theory approach.PloS one · 2023Article
- How have governments supported citizens stranded abroad due to COVID-19 travel restrictions? A comparative analysis of the financial and health support in eleven countries.BMC infectious diseases · 2022Article
- Qualitative exploration of intentions, concerns and information needs of vaccine-hesitant adults initially prioritised to receive COVID-19 vaccines in Australia.Australian and New Zealand journal of public health · 2022Article
- Readability assessment of patient educational materials for shoulder arthroplasty from top academic orthopedic institutions.JSES international · 2022Article
- Factors Influencing Australian Healthcare Workers' COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions across Settings: A Cross-Sectional Survey.Vaccines · 2021Article
- Integrating the Essentials Core Competencies Related to Health Literacy Into Undergraduate Curriculum: Tapping Traditional and Emerging Education Strategies.Public health nursing (Boston, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveGovernment communications in a crisis can influence public health outcomes. This research aimed to investigate if written communications of the most commonly sought sources of COVID-19 information available on the internet have readability levels commensurate with those of the general public.
methodsOnline documents from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the governments of Australia, the UK and the US were assessed for readability using an online instrument that calculated scores for the Flesch Reading Ease Score, the SMOG Index and the Readability Consensus Grade Level.
resultsSimilar to the previous research, most documents assessed had a readability standard that was at or above the recommended grade level, and as such inaccessible to substantial portions of the general public. A one-way ANOVA with post hoc tests revealed significant differences among the data, with Australian documents significantly more difficult to read than those from the UK and US.
conclusionsGovernment departments need to consider their audience and monitor readability of the documents they produce to ensure that readers can understand them. Implications for public health: Health communications need to be written at a level appropriate for the targeted population in order to be fit for purpose.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.