The fuzzy decodings of educative texts

An educative text about leprosy was played to two groups of students of the Nursing School of University of São Paulo, one of them having been submitted to a special training program on Hanseniasis. After the hearing session, the students recalled the text, constructed the graph of this recall and pointed out the degree of confidence of each information in this graph. The results showed that the untrained people had a fuzzier decoding than the trained students, and favored the information about stigmas and taboos associated to this disease. On the contrary, the trained students focused their attention on the information concerned with the treatment and self-care to prevent body deformation. The results support the idea that fuzzy graph theory may be used to quantify the decoding of educative texts used on health care programs, and thus to evaluate the adequacy of the information intended to be transmitted.