Study: Infant car seat instructions too difficult
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Instructions for installing child safety seats in cars are written in language too difficult for many adults to understand, researchers say.
Such manuals are written at a tenth-grade reading level on average, according to a new study, while data suggest that nearly a quarter of U.S. adults read at or below a fifth-grade level, and at least 25 percent read at about an eighth-grade level.
The findings are cause for concern because motor vehicle collisions are a leading cause of death and injury for infants and children. About 80 percent of car safety seats are improperly installed or misused, the study found.
The study, appearing Monday in the March issue of Pediatrics, was conducted by Dr. Mark Wegner and Deborah Girasek at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, which represents car-seat makers, disputed the findings.
But Joe Colella of the National Safe Kids Campaign, an advocacy group that works with manufacturers on child safety issues, said most are aware of the problem.
For liability reasons, lawyers usually are involved in writing installation instructions, and legal jargon might make instructions sound confusing, Colella said.
Car-seat makers "have made us aware that they're going to rewrite most of their instructions" to make them more readable, he said.
Many city police and fire departments offer help in installing child seats.
Frank Grgas, a firefighter in Gurnee, Illinois, said his department gets dozens of calls a month from parents needing help with car seats.
"Ninety percent of them in Illinois are installed incorrectly," he said.
Grgas said he doesn't know if that's because the seats are hard to install, the instructions are difficult or parents just aren't reading them. "I've read through quite a few of them, and some of them can be confusing," he said.
Girasek said manufacturers could help by writing installation instructions at a fifth-grade level, which literacy experts say is optimal for understanding health-related information.
Simplifying car-seat design and installation also might be beneficial, but that would be more costly, Girasek said.
Studies are needed to prove whether either change would affect death and injury rates, but simplifying instructions would be a commonsense "relatively easy fix" in the meantime, she said.
"This could be accomplished by using shorter sentences and simpler words. For example, 'collision,' 'automobile,' and 'remedied' could be replaced by 'crash,' 'car,' and 'fixed,"' according to the study.
The researchers analyzed installation instructions from every major child safety seat manufacturer for models through 1999.
They found instructions written at reading levels ranging from seventh to 12th grade, based on a test used extensively to analyze readability of health literature. Reading difficulty was tied to the number of words with three or more syllables appearing in 10-sentence samples.
Readability was not significantly related to cost; car seats ranged in price from $58 to $207.
So, is it more worrying that 80% of car seats are installed improperly or that so many Americans read at such low levels? Really, this whole story makes me feel rather dismayed and sad.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 02:18 (twenty-three years ago)
For liability reasons, lawyers usually are involved in writing installation instructions, and legal jargon might make instructions sound confusing,I haven't had to deal with a car seat in almost a decade, but I'd bet this is the key problem here (this and people just plain not reading the directions). Part of my old job used to be proofreading for technical writers, and that aspect ended up being eliminated because the best we could do was check for grammar: most of the time, we had no idea what they were talking about, and they had no better way to explain it than what they'd come up with on paper.
(I mean, look at the instructions for some of those basic things you've never actually read the instructions for, sometime -- or try writing instructions for "walking": describing mechanical operations in non-technical terms is hard. Hell, for that matter, I've gotten lost a number of times when I didn't know if "turn left after the third stop" meant the turn right there at the stop or the next one.)
― Tep (ktepi), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 04:33 (twenty-three years ago)
Tep - one of the first assignments in many tech. writing courses (at least at UCF) is writing a set of basic instructions, such as "Tying a Bow/Tying Shoelaces" or "Boiling Water" or "Brushing Teeth"...you get the idea. To make things even more complex each person was also assigned a specific character to write the instructions for (blind, twenty-year-old man, seventy-year-old black female, etc.). The worst assignments ever. Really.
I think that many tech. writers are stuck writing directions/instructions for stuff that they've never seen or are not familair with - and they're usually brought-in at the last minute, when it occurs to someone that "Oh, we need some documentation, don't we?" And then, when their text is transferred to the legal department things get sticky, because then the engineers want to look at the wording again---it ends-up being a cycle with noone being in charge until the deadline arrives and the darn documentation is rapidly reproduced and disributed, regardless of accuracy.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Tuesday, 4 March 2003 05:25 (twenty-three years ago)