Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
This chapter investigates whether Taiwanese university students find EL in health information difficult. On average, approximately 90% of them did not have difficulty understanding EL while about 10% of them did. The rates of difficulty appear to increase with the severity of the health condition. Furthermore, the higher the number of different elastic terms intensively used in the excerpt, the more difficulty the participants experience in understanding EL. Based on interviews with approximately 20 participants, we address what may cause the difficulty and identify six reasons (e.g., unfulfilled expectation of specific information, semantic fuzziness combined with insufficient health literacy, unclear instructions that do not match the needs of the patient and family, increased vagueness caused by the intensive use of EL). In order to understand participants’ attitudes towards EL and non-EL, we analysed the participants’ written feedback as to why they preferred EL or non-EL in the health context. Six frames were identified, each with two orientations. Four of the most frequently activated frames are communication, folk–idiosyncratic, trust–scepticism, and voluntary–involuntary action. Two social factors (i.e., gender and age) in relation to Taiwanese participants’ perceptions of and attitudes towards EL are also addressed.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.