Despite extensive literature on the comprehensibility of educational materials for topics such as nutrition, smoking cessation, and cancer treatment, there is little published research on the comprehensibility of materials used for workplace hazard communication.
The comprehensibility, relevance and practicability of the items used for the assessment of the societal impact factor, the glossary as well as the information to reviewers and to authors were rated as acceptable (1 or 2) by all external reviewers.
Majority might have acknowledged its value on this aspect but some students argued that the rubrics used in class (specifically the rubric used for debate) can still be improved in terms of clarity and comprehensibility.
The questions used for answering the research questions addressed in this paper are shown in Additional file 1. Face validity, content validity and comprehensibility of the draft questionnaire were assessed by the steering committee, which included three scientists in the field of end-of-life care and two GPs.
To ensure comprehensibility and feasibility, a pilot test was conducted among 3-5 graduate students with relevant professional background as well as among a few public and private hospitals; feedback was then used for revision.
The questions used for each item were, for manageability, 'Do you usually see a solution to problems and difficulties that other people find hopeless?'; for meaningfulness, 'Do you usually feel that your daily life is a source of personal satisfaction?', and for comprehensibility, 'Do you usually feel that the things that happen to you in your daily life are hard to understand?'.
ABC-O questions were tested for comprehensibility using cognitive interviews (n = 10), for test-retest reliability (n = 100), and for content validity using expert ratings (n = 8) of relevance and representativeness.
The questionnaire used in this study was tested for comprehensibility and suitability in preliminary trials on 123 nursing and healthcare staff at a psychiatric unit, an inpatient care facility for the elderly and a facility for people with disabilities.
The questionnaire was pre-tested for comprehensibility and factor analysis was used to explore validity.
Phase one involved development of an online training module based on the Nigerian Code of Health Research Ethics (NCHRE) and uploading it to the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative CITII) website while the second phase entailed the evaluation of the module for comprehensibility, readability and ease of use by 45 Nigerian biomedical researchers.
