1 Department of Radiology, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD.
2 Department of Family Medicine, Albany Medical College, Albany, NY.
AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2018 Nov;211(5):1128-1134. doi: 10.2214/AJR.17.19299. Epub 2018 Sep 21.
The Internet has become a major readily available source of health care education. Pediatric radiation safety is a complex topic with evolving safety guidelines. The purpose of this study is to assess the readability of publically available online information pertaining to pediatric radiation safety available on the websites of radiologic and pediatric societies.
Online information related to pediatric radiation safety that is available on the Society for Pediatric Radiology website and the websites RadiologyInfo (sponsored by the Radiological Society of North America and the American College of Radiology) and HealthyChildren.org (sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics) was evaluated for readability. Each article was assessed using six readability tests, which use either a grade level or a numeric scale to categorize readability. ANOVA was used to compare readability levels and intraclass correlation coefficients for analytic reliability.
A total of 54 articles were included in the analysis. Three of the articles were written below the eighth-grade reading level. The mean readability ranged from grades 12.1 to 14.8 among the five different grade level-based readability scales used. The mean readability determined using the numeric scale was 37.3 (which identified readability as difficult), with 91% of articles categorized as very difficult, difficult, or fairly difficult and with no article categorized as easy or very easy. No difference in readability was found among the different web sources (p = 0.46-0.85).
Overall, the readability of information pertaining to pediatric radiation safety that is available on radiology and pediatric medical society websites is at a level that is too difficult for the average adult.
互联网已成为获取医疗保健教育的主要来源。儿科辐射安全是一个具有不断发展的安全指南的复杂主题。本研究的目的是评估放射学和儿科协会网站上提供的与儿科辐射安全相关的公共在线信息的可读性。
评估了可在儿科放射学会网站以及 RadiologyInfo（由北美放射学会和美国放射学会赞助）和 HealthyChildren.org（由美国儿科学会赞助）网站上获得的与儿科辐射安全相关的在线信息的可读性。使用了六种可读性测试来评估每篇文章，这些测试使用年级或数字量表来对可读性进行分类。使用方差分析来比较可读性水平和组内相关系数以进行分析可靠性。
共有 54 篇文章纳入分析。三篇文章的阅读水平低于八年级。在使用的五种不同的基于年级的可读性量表中，平均可读性范围从 12.1 到 14.8 级。使用数字量表确定的平均可读性为 37.3（表示可读性困难），91％的文章被归类为非常困难、困难或相当困难，没有文章被归类为容易或非常容易。不同的网络来源之间的可读性没有差异（p = 0.46-0.85）。
总体而言，放射学和儿科医学协会网站上提供的有关儿科辐射安全的信息的可读性对于普通成年人来说太难了。
