We randomly selected articles from the consumeroriented
Web pages of the associations that, at the time,
represented the top 5 health-related causes of death, per an
October 2006 report from the National Center for Health
Statistics (Table 1).9 To ensure the articles from the American
Lung Association were specific to COPD, we selected
the articles from the “COPD Center” page of that Web
site. We gathered a convenience sample of 20 articles from
each association’s Web site, from lists of consumeroriented
articles. Specifically, at each Web site, without
reading the article titles, one of the authors (TMW) randomly
selected 20 articles from the site’s list of publicly
available articles by placing the pointer on random articles
and downloading them. We then categorized the articles
into 5 domains: