Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 39, Issue 2, 2017

Comprehensible Language and Effective Communication II

This special issue presents an overview of the outcomes of the research programme called Comprehensible Language and Effective Communication (Dutch National Science Foundation, 2011-2016). This programme aimed to stimulate fundamental and applied research on comprehensible and effective communication. A core characteristic of the programme was private-public cooperation: profit and non-profit organisations contributed to the programme and to the research projects within the program. A second characteristic of the programme was its interdisciplinarity. The research projects combined expertise from linguistic communication, communication science, health communication, political communication and education. The projects focused on a variety of domains in which comprehensibility is crucial, such as communication about personal finance and health. The articles in this special issue provide an overview of some core results.

At risk? Me? A report on two studies into how people give meaning to information in online health checks.

This article reports on two qualitative user studies that were designed to understand how people interpret and give meaning to information from online health checks. The object of both studies was the Dutch PreventionConsult, consisting of a short cardiometabolic risk calculator and an elaborate survey measuring lifestyle. In study 1, sixteen people completed the risk calculator. In study 2, twenty people completed the risk calculator as well as the lifestyle survey. In both studies, semi-structured interviews were held to examine how the participants had interpreted the online health (risk) information provided. A qualitative thematic analysis of the interview data revealed that people generally used existing knowledge and beliefs rather than the information provided in the health check to interpret their test results. This suggests that online health information as provided in health checks could be improved by building on these existing lay views, e.g. by more explicitly referring to information that people deem relevant, such as family history.

On the road to a healthier lifestyle: Developing narrative health interventions for truck drivers

Compared to other professional groups, truck drivers are a low SES group with a relatively unhealthy lifestyle and relatively poor health outcomes. From an analysis of current health interventions aimed at truck drivers, it appears that designers assume that their unhealthy behavior is caused by a lack of motivation to change their unhealthy lifestyle, and that the most effective strategy is to underscore the undesirable consequences of the current behavior as well as the desirable ones of the recommended behavior. This leads to persuasive messages that pose relatively high demands on the target group’s cognitive capabilities: hidden premises must be inferred, and the applied argumentation scheme must be identified in order to estimate the arguments’ strength. For members of the target group, such argumentative interventions may be too complex. Moreover, many of the target group are already motivated. Many truck drivers wish to live a healthier life, but do not know how to overcome obstacles in their work and private contexts, thus lacking a bridge between intending and acting. We conducted an experiment to investigate the possibilities of narrative health interventions for this target group. The results of this experiment suggest that narrative health interventions may be an effective communication strategy for lower SES target groups.

Health education about alcohol and tobacco use for low literate adolescents: the role of connectives

This paper first overviews the results of eight experiments that examined the effects of school health communication about alcohol and tobacco on low educated adolescents. Overall, it was found that there was a short term knowledge increase but only among adolescents with less knowledge. Also, the attitude became more negative towards alcohol among adolescents who were more positive towards alcohol at baseline. All of these effects disappeared within a month. There were no effects on intention. Importantly, the format of the health communication did not matter. Results were largely identical for print and audiovisual versions, as well as for informational and narrative versions. Adding testimonials of adolescents to the print and audiovisual informational formats did not make a difference.

The second part of this paper focuses on a ninth experiment that tested the effects of connectives in alcohol health education. Studies on school education texts suggested that texts are easier interpretable if sentences are linked by connectives, but so far this has not been tested on health education texts for low educated adolescents. Overall, we found no differential effects on knowledge, attitude, and intention between a condition with connectives and a condition without connectives.

Comprehension of pension communication: effects of legal obligations, literacy and revisions

In a project on Financial Communication, research has been done in the domains of pensions, mortgages and debt collection. This paper presents the results of three studies, concentrating on the pension domain. In the first study we reflect upon mandated disclosure. We demonstrate that the legal context for pension communication is far more detailed than for the other domains. There is a specific law on pension communication with detailed instructions for different documents. Pension organizations consider these obligations as a hindrance for effective and tailored pension communication. In the second study we tested whether participants could locate and comprehend specific information in two versions (original and revision) of three pension documents. We also measured the level of financial literacy of the participants. We demonstrate that in one case study the revision of the document resulted in a reverse Matthew-effect: participants with lower levels of financial literacy performed better in finding information using the revised document compared to the original. This reverse effect is labelled as a Martinus-effect.

Voting Advice via Internet: Political literacy in a digital information society

The central aim in our NWO ‘Comprehensible Language’ project (2012-2016) was to investigate to what extent Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) intentionally and unintentionally affect political knowledge and political attitudes. In this article, we present an overview of four years of research. First, we investigated reasons for use of VAAs, distinguishing three types of users: checkers (well-informed, enjoying to check the VAA), seekers (looking for political information to base their vote on) and doubters (looking for information but cynical about politics). The proportions of these groups differ for first vs. second order elections. Second, we investigated whether VAAs increase users’ political knowledge. We found that users report an increase of internal efficacy due to their VAA use, but we did not find an increase in actual political knowledge. Third, a field experiment showed systematic effects of framing variation on the answers to VAA assertions, which might suggest different underlying knowledge representations. Finally, think aloud research showed that users experience considerable problems with understanding the assertions semantically and pragmatically, as well as with interpreting the results screen. Additionally, we found that users view the result screen as an end point rather than as a starting point for deliberation. We discuss some implications for theory and practice.

Evidence-based advice for comprehensible writing, a daydream?

Organizations and writers striving to use plain language could benefit from evidence-based pieces of writing advice. At present, recommendations for producing comprehensible texts are often based on experience with the target group and/or common-sense logic, while previous effect studies have shown that applying such recommendations does not necessarily improve texts. In this paper we show the complexity of translating research results into evidence-based advice for comprehensible writing by discussing three dilemmas. First, we discuss the selection of a reliable evidence base, with a focus on the selection of measures that objectively reflect comprehension. Second, we discuss the generalizability of research results to types of texts, tasks, modalities, and readers other than the ones actually studied. Third, we address the complexity of turning conflicting results and subtle interaction effects into valid and nuanced but still comprehensible and applicable recommendations. We will argue that, due to its complexity, this ‘translation’ needs to be made by linguists instead of laymen.

Simplifying educational text: how is it done, and does it help?

The Dutch canon offers 50 short texts that teach Dutch students about important parts of Dutch culture and history. Those texts are provided at three levels of complexity. The first part of this paper presents an automatic analysis of the linguistic features that have been modified in simplifying the texts. The versions differ most in word complexity and frequency, concreteness, syntactic complexity and cohesion. Smaller effects are found for human interest, and none for connectives. Correlations show that lexical and syntactic simplifications go hand in hand with increased cohesion. Given the text topic, syntax and cohesion are shown to vary more widely than word frequency and especially concreteness.

The second part of the paper tests the comprehension effects of a particular medium-level simplification, concerning a text on the First World War. The main stylistic revisions concern lexical complexity and cohesion; furthermore, the revision ads headings. The experiment used a 2x2 design with stylistic level and headings (yes/no) as factors. 234 students from grades five, eight and nine answered comprehension questions. Across the board, we find higher comprehension scores for the stylistic revision; no heading effects are found.