Mangelnde Verständlichkeit durch Fachsprache in Gesundheitsinformationen zu chronischen Erkrankungen – eine qualitative Korpusanalyse

Health information conveys specialist knowledge to laypersons to support informed decision-making. Functional health information must be comprehensible, linkable, and action-enabling. Health information is often difficult to understand. Most research has focused on comprehensibility indices to determine comprehensibility. We analyze samples of health information to identify hidden characteristics that impair comprehensibility.

Five pieces of health information were analysed manually and using software to evaluate their comprehensibility. The texts, which were taken from apotheken-umschau.de, inform laypeople about chronic diseases. The analysis follows a text-based approach and focuses on text properties that impact comprehensibility. These include, for example, word and sentence length, technical terms, and nominal style. Analysis of hidden characteristics focuses on how expert terminology is used.

The texts show medium to low comprehensibility scores according to the Hohenheim comprehensibility index (HIX). Although they are aimed at laypersons, they contain many parameters of expert language, such as nominal structures, a high number of medical terminology and a complex syntactic structure. The use of expert terminology in its specific context requires fundamental knowledge that is not built into the texts. This results in low comprehensibility, which increases the risk that they cannot be understood and subsequently applied, especially by recipients with low health literacy.

Comprehensibility of health information needs to be improved not only by addressing features of overt linguistic complexity. Authors also need to consider the implied knowledge presuppositions of their texts and adapt them to their readers, e.g. by using Plain German.