A comparison of different approaches for editing health-related information: an author's satisfaction perspective
Alessandra Rossetti, Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez, Juliane Ried, Sharon O’Brien · Dublin City University Open Access Institutional Repository (Dublin City University) · 2017
The need to provide health information in Plain English (PE) for non-native speakers and for individuals with low literacy levels has been widely acknowledged (Gilliver 2015; Parker and Kreps 2005). Use of PE has also shown to facilitate translation. Numerous institutions (e.g. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Cochrane) currently provide guidelines on how to develop health content in PE. In addition, authoring support tools (such as Acrolinx) are being increasingly used to simplify health information (Azzam et al. 2016; Ojala 2013), particularly as a result of the difficulties that contributors may encounter in remembering long lists of PE guidelines while editing (Temnikova 2012; Aikawa et al. 2007). This study investigates differences in the level of satisfaction experienced by authors when editing health content using both an automated and a non-automated approach. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has compared these scenarios in terms of author's satisfaction. Authors will be asked to simplify selected content of Cochrane's Systematic Reviews using two scenarios: (i) by manually implementing Cochrane's guidelines for plain language summaries (e.g. The Cochrane Collaboration 2013), i.e. through a non-automated approach; and (ii) by applying Acrolinx author support rules (Bredenkamp et al. 2000), i.e. by means of an automated approach. Satisfaction will be measured via post-session questionnaires (Brooke 1996). Preliminary results based on data collected during a secondment at Cochrane UK in Oxford will be presented. We expect that findings referring to authors' satisfaction will be particularly important in the case of editing environments that rely on volunteers (e.g. Cochrane or Simple English Wikipedia). Developing an editing scenario that maximises volunteer authors' satisfaction might increase the number of contributors and, in turn, the amount of health information which is made available in PE.