Waters Erika A, Weinstein Neil D, Colditz Graham A, Emmons Karen
Department of Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA.
J Health Commun. 2006 Mar;11(2):167-82. doi: 10.1080/10810730500526695.
To make treatment decisions, patients should consider not only a treatment option's potential consequences but also the probability of those consequences. Many laypeople, however, have difficulty using probability information. This Internet-based study (2,601 participants) examined a hypothetical medical tradeoff situation in which a treatment would decrease one risk but increase another. Accuracy was assessed in terms of the ability to determine correctly whether the treatment would increase or decrease the total risk. For these tradeoff problems, accuracy was greater when the following occurred: (1) the amount of cognitive effort required to evaluate the tradeoff was reduced; (2) probability information was presented as a graphical display rather than as text only; and (3) information was presented as percentages rather than as frequencies (n in 100). These findings provide suggestions of ways to present risk probabilities that may help patients understand their treatment options.
为了做出治疗决策，患者不仅应考虑一种治疗方案的潜在后果，还应考虑这些后果发生的可能性。然而，许多外行人在使用概率信息方面存在困难。这项基于互联网的研究（2601名参与者）考察了一种假设的医疗权衡情况，即一种治疗会降低一种风险，但会增加另一种风险。根据正确判断治疗会增加还是降低总体风险的能力来评估准确性。对于这些权衡问题，在以下情况下准确性更高：（1）评估权衡所需的认知努力量减少；（2）概率信息以图形显示而非仅以文本形式呈现；（3）信息以百分比而非频率（每100中的n）呈现。这些发现为呈现风险概率的方式提供了建议，可能有助于患者理解他们的治疗选择。
