Readable Material Research Articles

Readability of HIV/AIDS educational materials: the role of the medium of communication, target audience, and producer characteristics

The reading difficulty of many HIV/AIDS brochures and pamphlets limits their effectiveness. This analysis addresses correlates of readability in 136 HIV/AIDS educational items. Readability is measured using the SMOG Index. The medium of communication is significantly related to readability: comic books and brochures are, on average, more readable than books and pamphlets (10.9 versus 11.9). The target audience also differentiates readability. Materials for HIV antibody test seekers, the general community, and sexually active adults have a more difficult reading grade, averaging 12.1, whereas materials for ethnic minorities average a more readable 9.2. The producer organization's type and location are unrelated to readability, but an AIDS-specific organizational focus correlates with better readability (grade 10.8 vs. 11.8). These findings remain significant in multivariate analysis. The results indicate that brochures and comics are more likely to be comprehended by low-literacy populations, that an understanding of the literacy of target audiences is needed to produce materials with appropriate reading levels, and that policies to influence producer organizations may result in the creation of more readable materials.

Cultural change and the ghetto

Ghetto literature, the product of intense feeling and dramatic experience, has always been the most readable material of American urban history, indeed the only books which could command a wide audience.1 Today inter-racial conflict and the segregated pattern of Negro housing in our cities encourage urbanists to seek analogies between the urbanization of European peasants in American cities and the urbanization of the formerly rural American Negro.2 Both literary tradition and current interest create a severe historical distortion. The first tells of the integration of American society through the diffusion of immigrants and their descendants from a first settlement in tight urban clusters to a later suburban inter-mixture. Although such a process of cultural change did take place on a massive scale in many cities, assimilation by way of a ghetto has always been a limited case in American urban history, limited both in time span and in membership. Most foreign immigrants to American cities never lived in ghettos, and most immigrant ghettos that did exist were the product of the largest cities and the eastern and southern European immigrants of