Readability Standards for Informed-Consent Forms as Compared with Actual Readability

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are charged with safeguarding potential research subjects with limited literacy but may have an inadvertent role in promulgating unreadable consent forms. We hypothesized that text provided by IRBs in informed-consent forms falls short of the IRBs' own readability standards and that readability is influenced by the level of research activity, local literacy rates, and federal oversight.

To test these hypotheses, we conducted a cross-sectional study linking data from several public-use sources. A total of 114 Web sites of U.S. medical schools were surveyed for IRB readability standards and informed-consent-form templates. Actual readability was measured with the Flesch-Kincaid scale, which assigns a score on the basis of the minimal grade level required to read and understand English text (range, 0 to 12). Data on the level of research activity, local literacy rates, and federal oversight were obtained from organizational Web sites.