Assessing caregiver informative materials on the Ketogenic Diet in Italy: a textual ethnographic approach

Caregiver informative materials are an important complement to verbal interaction in medical encounters enhancing caregivers’ health literacy and this is particularly true when dealing with treatments that are still little known, as is the ketogenic diet (KD) for pediatric refractory epilepsy in Italy. Their value is dependent upon whether they contain useful information from the viewpoint of the caregiver and are easily understood. The present study analyses informative booklets on the KD found in the Italian context, combining an ethnographic and a textual perspective, i.e. textual ethnography (Swales 1998) for assessing the quality of written caregiver information on the KD in Italy. We based our analysis on a two-fold methodology involving an Information Satisfaction Questionnaire (ISQ) and the application of a framework theory created by Clerehan et al. (2005), i.e. the Evaluative Linguistic Framework (ELF). Results show that together with the ethnographic assessment of informative materials obtained through the questionnaire, the analysis of key linguistic features gave important evidence to improve the quality of informational texts for caregivers.