Résumé :
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Processing of administrative documents by the poorly educated. This study investigates how people with low levels of education understand forms explaining how to qualify for unemployment benefits, the sums involves and the duration of these benefits. The standard form consisting of a set of rules was contrastedwith question-comprehension procedure. This procedure makes explicit which questions need to be answered, why information is required, and what conclusions need to be drawn to respond appropriately. The data show that the procedure version was read faster and yielded more accurate responses when the text was short. Several sources of error were identified. 1) The processing of connectives such as (and, or, if) was poor and most subjects tended to process the information in each clause separately. 2) The lack of mutually exclusive categories in which subjects could belong to many. Here, subjects tended to restrict themselves to only one category, as though the categories were exclusive, rather than examining each relevant category and choosing the best case. The findings also show that providing examples improves conprehension of the form.
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