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02/07/2004: "The Readability of the APA's Insurance Trust's Sample Informed Consent Document"

Every once in a while I, too, even glance at the syllabus. I was curious as to how the APAIT's informed consent document stacked up against others. Had they heeded the previous research on informed consent documents, and how they are written at a level too high for many clients?

I downloaded the sample document and, like we did Thursday, opened it in Microsoft Word. Here are the readability statistics:

Paragraphs: 40
Sentences: 116

Sentences Per Paragraph: 4.2
Words Per Sentence: 20.5
Characters Per Word: 4.7

Passive Sentences: 12%
Flesch Reading Ease: 50.7
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 11.2

Note: I deleted the first two pages of instructions to the psychologist before running the analysis, in case you want to replicate.

This document shows improvement over studied IC forms in some ways: it uses easier-to-understand active sentences, and it doesn't use too many big words. It also keeps the paragraphs simpler (4 sentences per paragraph). However, the sentences are on the long side (20 words on average), and as a result, it comes out as a relatively complicated document. If you review the Microsoft word entry for the readability statistics, it recommends aiming for a 7th-8th grade reading level, or a reading ease score of 60-70, with higher scores meaning easier readability.

So even this sample or model document doesn't do everything well.