Can patient narratives retain attention to health information? An eye tracking study of attention to health information texts.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2023-02-28
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
A patient will likely forget 40-80% of health information directly after reading it. This can negatively affect their health care. Recall of this information could improve when it receives more attention. As most people obtain health information online, health organisations should present online health information in an attention-sustaining way. Studies on narratives suggest that patient narratives, compared to expository health texts, could herein be effective. However, these studies mainly employed self-measurement methods. Moreover, opposing results have been found as well. Specifically, transportation and attitude towards the text seem to affect attention to health information positively or negatively. The current research investigated to what extent people pay more attention to a patient narrative versus an expository health information text. In addition, it was investigated to what extent attitude towards the text is related to attention. Moreover, the effect of text type on recall of health information and to what extent the degree of transportation affects recall was investigated. To research this, an eye-tracking experiment was set up with an online questionnaire, in which 30 subjects read health information on a hospital’s webpage presented in a patient narrative or exposition. Results showed that the patient narrative overall received more attention than the expository text. But heat maps showed that health information written in bullet points (exposition) received more attention than written in running text (narrative). However, more attention was unrelated to better recall nor higher degrees of transportation. Although subjects had better attitudes towards the patient narrative than the expository text, it was unrelated to more attention. Moreover, recall was not different between the text genres nor between lower versus higher transported subjects. Health organisations should use expository health information texts for practicality but could include an introductory patient narrative to retain the reader’s attention to confrontational topics for example.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren