PGY-5 fellow Cohen Children's Medical Center Bellerose, New York, United States
Background: Health literacy is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
The readability of educational materials, defined as the “the quality of being easy and enjoyable to read” plays a crucial role in Health Literacy. The American Medical Association (AMA) recommends that patient education materials (PEMs) are written at or below 6th grade level. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommends an 8th grade level or below.
According to the 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), Hispanic adults have the lowest health literacy of all ethnic groups in the United States. Several studies have examined the association of low parental health literacy with poor outcomes among children.
Studies about the readability of PEMs in Spanish have had mixed results. No studies to date have focused on information provided to parents of children with ASD. Objective: To evaluate the readability of Spanish language PEMs directed at parents of children with autism to determine whether they align with the recommendations from the AMA and/or NIH. Design/Methods: Spanish-language PEMs were selected from a variety of national organizations, including professional medical organizations, government organizations and non-profit advocacy organizations listed as resources by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) “Cómo Comprender el Trastorno del Espectro del Autismo”
Texts were analyzed using the algorithm provided by the website Legibilidad.es. This algorithm implements the most commonly used readability formulas for texts in Spanish including the Fernández-Huerta formula, one of the most commonly used to analyze texts in Spanish. Texts with a score of 0 are the most difficult, those with a score of 100 are the least difficult. Grade levels are assigned based on these scores.
A second stage of this project will analyze the top 5 PEMs that result from searching the term “¿Qué es el autismo?” on different engines while using incognito mode
