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How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses
Plain language summaries (PLS) aim to communicate research findings to laypersons in an easily understandable manner. Despite the societal relevance of making psychological research findings available to the public, our empirical knowledge on how to write PLS of psychology studies is still scarce. I...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717946/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34975663 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771399 |
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author | Kerwer, Martin Stoll, Marlene Jonas, Mark Benz, Gesa Chasiotis, Anita |
author_facet | Kerwer, Martin Stoll, Marlene Jonas, Mark Benz, Gesa Chasiotis, Anita |
author_sort | Kerwer, Martin |
collection | PubMed |
description | Plain language summaries (PLS) aim to communicate research findings to laypersons in an easily understandable manner. Despite the societal relevance of making psychological research findings available to the public, our empirical knowledge on how to write PLS of psychology studies is still scarce. In this article, we present two experimental studies investigating six characteristics of PLS for psychological meta-analyses. We specifically focused on approaches for (1) handling technical terms, (2) communicating the quality of evidence by explaining the methodological approach of meta-analyses, (3) explaining how synthesized studies operationalized their research questions, (4) handling statistical terms, (5) structuring PLS, and (6) explaining complex meta-analytic designs. To develop empirically validated guidelines on writing PLS, two randomized controlled studies including large samples stratified for education status, age, and gender (N(Study1)=2,288 and N(Study2)=2,211) were conducted. Eight PLS of meta-analyses from different areas of psychology were investigated as study materials. Main outcome variables were user experience (i.e., perceived accessibility, perceived understanding, and perceived empowerment) and knowledge acquisition, as well as understanding and knowledge of the quality of evidence. Overall, our hypotheses were partially confirmed, with our results underlining, among other things, the importance of explaining or replacing content-related technical terms (i.e., theoretical concepts) and indicating the detrimental effects of providing too many details on statistical concepts on user experience. Drawing on these and further findings, we derive five empirically well-founded rules on the lay-friendly communication of meta-analytic research findings in psychology. Implications for PLS authors and future research on PLS are discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8717946 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87179462021-12-31 How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses Kerwer, Martin Stoll, Marlene Jonas, Mark Benz, Gesa Chasiotis, Anita Front Psychol Psychology Plain language summaries (PLS) aim to communicate research findings to laypersons in an easily understandable manner. Despite the societal relevance of making psychological research findings available to the public, our empirical knowledge on how to write PLS of psychology studies is still scarce. In this article, we present two experimental studies investigating six characteristics of PLS for psychological meta-analyses. We specifically focused on approaches for (1) handling technical terms, (2) communicating the quality of evidence by explaining the methodological approach of meta-analyses, (3) explaining how synthesized studies operationalized their research questions, (4) handling statistical terms, (5) structuring PLS, and (6) explaining complex meta-analytic designs. To develop empirically validated guidelines on writing PLS, two randomized controlled studies including large samples stratified for education status, age, and gender (N(Study1)=2,288 and N(Study2)=2,211) were conducted. Eight PLS of meta-analyses from different areas of psychology were investigated as study materials. Main outcome variables were user experience (i.e., perceived accessibility, perceived understanding, and perceived empowerment) and knowledge acquisition, as well as understanding and knowledge of the quality of evidence. Overall, our hypotheses were partially confirmed, with our results underlining, among other things, the importance of explaining or replacing content-related technical terms (i.e., theoretical concepts) and indicating the detrimental effects of providing too many details on statistical concepts on user experience. Drawing on these and further findings, we derive five empirically well-founded rules on the lay-friendly communication of meta-analytic research findings in psychology. Implications for PLS authors and future research on PLS are discussed. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-12-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8717946/ /pubmed/34975663 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771399 Text en Copyright © 2021 Kerwer, Stoll, Jonas, Benz and Chasiotis. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Kerwer, Martin Stoll, Marlene Jonas, Mark Benz, Gesa Chasiotis, Anita How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title | How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title_full | How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title_fullStr | How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title_full_unstemmed | How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title_short | How to Put It Plainly? Findings From Two Randomized Controlled Studies on Writing Plain Language Summaries for Psychological Meta-Analyses |
title_sort | how to put it plainly? findings from two randomized controlled studies on writing plain language summaries for psychological meta-analyses |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717946/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34975663 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771399 |
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