Although it is known that parents and families of children with cancer need information in making decisions about treatment with medical professionals, little is known about the information-seeking behavior of parents of children with cancer. The purpose of this study is to clarify the information-seeking behavior of parents in relation to their consent for treatment decisions. The frequency of use of various medical information sources and other determinants were investigated, and multiple regression analysis was used to evaluate which types of information sources influence parental consent for their children's treatment decisions.

The results showed a small but positive influence of attending physicians (β = 1.72, p = .028) and medical institution websites which are belong to their attending physician or not, (β = 0.87, p = .016) on consent for treatment decisions, a negative influence of doctor-authored website (β = -0.8, p = .042) on consent for treatment decisions, and a negative influence of parents' critical communicative health literacy (β = 0.63, p = .003) rather than parental critical health literacy was associated with consent to treatment decisions as a determinant of information seeking behavior. These results suggest that parents who use physician-directed websites may access online information delivered by various doctors and be more cautious about consenting to treatment choices than parents who use the websites of their physicians and medical institutions as information sources. Therefore, medical staff and information professionals should consider that the information-seeking behavior of parents of children with cancer is influenced by personal attributes and that information should be provided in the early stages of diagnosis according to the literacy and educational background of the parents.

The overall research objective is to identify the culture differences in reaction to rewards on problem-solving performance, using accuracy and risk-taking as performance measurements, of participants from different cultures in an experimental study. The experiment was a 2×2 factorial design with two levels of reward (monetary reward and no-reward) and two levels of nationality (Japanese and non-Japanese). In total 84 participants took part in the experiment by solving Sudoku puzzles.

The study finds firstly, that non-Japanese participants show a significantly higher risk-taking score than Japanese participants. Secondly, Japanese participants with no reward have significantly higher scores for accuracy than non-Japanese participants. These results suggest the unique characteristics of Japanese participants to carry out tasks independent of monetary reward.

It is necessary that family, school, and community including public library positively tackle promotion of reading activities for formation and continuation of children’s reading habit. In this study, we investigated the contents of web pages for children’s reading in Japanese public library websites. It was found that prefectural libraries tended to construct the contents from the nationwide viewpoint, whereas municipal libraries concentrated on providing the contents on domestic and municipal level. Furthermore, we investigated the mutual links among web pages for children’s reading, children’s web pages, young adult web pages, and web pages for school support. It was made clear that children’s web pages were regarded as the center, also, web pages for children’s reading were most related to children’s web pages. In the future, it is preferable that the relationship between web pages for children’s reading and young adults web pages is considered and these contents are constructed positively.

In this study, we examined the effects of interaction with "touch" in reading of paper and electronic media, based on experiments on reading materials to find out error parts. In the experiment, 9 combinations of 3 conditions of display medium of paper, tablet, and PC display, and 3 conditions of interaction of untouchable, touchable, and writable were set. 12 young adults (mean 23.2) participated in the experiment. The work efficiency and subjective evaluation were carried out from three kinds of "error-seeking reading" subjects: sentence only, figure and its description, and finding errors in picture. As a result, the recall of the answer was higher in the touchable/writable condition than in the untouchable condition for paper and tablet, and higher in the touchable/writable condition than in the untouchable condition for PC. Also, the precision of the answer was lower on the PC than on the paper and tablet. The results of this experiment show that the paper and tablet, which interact directly with the fingers, can be read more efficiently than the PC, which interacts indirectly with the mouse.