Text highlighting for consumer insights: influence of text length and difficulty

Text highlighting is a novel method for measuring consumer attitudes where participants read information about a focal topic and use highlighting functions to select aspects of the text that they like and dislike. The present research contributed methodological knowledge about text highlighting by investigating how responses are influenced by two aspects of the texts — length and degree of reading difficulty. A case study pertaining to biodynamic agriculture was used to assess the research questions and empirical data were collected from 3718 consumers across four countries (United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Singapore). Results showed that both text length and reading difficulty influenced responses — overall frequency of highlighting, frequency of ‘like’ highlighting, frequency of ‘dislike’ highlighting, and sentiment scores — leading to recommendations about future implementations of the methodology. Specifically, a single highlighting task on a longer text is less recommended than consecutive highlighting tasks on shorter texts. Implementation of the latter increases highlighting frequency and is expected to be associated with greater participant task engagement. Text length also influenced sentiment scores but did so in a manner that was topic and content specific. Regarding text difficulty, significant differences were established for all types of highlighting responses, although the differences were smaller than found for text length. The recommendation is to use simple and familiar language that is suited to the groups of participants taking part in the study. A general recommendation is to interpret findings in the context of the presented information.

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