July 29 (late night) - PhD thesis of Suzanne Lynn Stevens

One last one before I go to bed....
Reading up just one more PhD dissertation.

Suzanne Lynn Stevens did her PhD dissertation on DEVELOPING GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING CHILD SAFETY PRINTED EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS: A USER-CENTERED APPROACH.

“This research increased our understanding of information design and well as generating general design guidelines for pamphlets. … produced a pamphlet for credible sources to use as an education tool for parents….”

3 Phases, 5 Studies. Variables (readability criteria) – name and details.

Pictorial illustrations, schematic diagrams, flowchart,

Study 1. Questionnaire with 5-point Likert scale; descriptive statistics; Chi-square test; Kendalls-Tau correlation of rankings and ratings.

Study 2. Questionnaire with 10 MCQ and 1 open-ended question.

Study 3. Questionnaire with 10 key points, 9-point Likert scale. Cloze test; ANOVA; Tukey’s HSD; Fisher’s Exact test.

Study 4. SMOG formula; BIDS-3 scale; RAIN instrument.

Study 5. Questionnaire with “two questions, the first assessing intent and the second assessing perceived control. Each of the questions used a bipolar scale using likely/unlikely and easy/difficult,” 14-day follow-up questionnaire (over the telephone). 3 hypothesis. Descriptive statistics; Tukey’s HSD; bar charts showing mean and standard deviation; data tables.

Guidelines for the design of an effective pamphlet was produced.

Stevens had done her studies in orderly and structured manner. Her data analysis were simplistic and easy to understand. I think this dissertation is worth revisiting...observing closely how she varied her research from Study 1 to Study 5....despite the fact that what she did is nothing close to what I am planning to do. Noted that her research did involve Usability to certain extent.