Users’ Perspectives on German Plain Language Summaries of Psychological Meta-Analyses (“KLARtexte”) - A Focus Group Study

To communicate research findings in a lay-friendly and scientifically correct way, plain language summaries (PLS) have been introduced. PLS are short summaries of scientific publications using lay-friendly language and accessible formatting. While the need for PLS is widely recognized, only rare evidence on effective criteria is available, and guidelines on how to write them differ considerably. In psychology, there is a particular lack of evidence-based guidance for PLS. Project “PLan Psy” aims at developing evidence-based guidelines for writing PLS of psychological meta-analyses. For this purpose, various empirical studies are conducted, including a qualitative study on users’ aims and expectations when reading PLS which is preregistered here.