Stuttering and Teachers in Kuwait

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Very, very nice paper!

From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 22 Oct 2009
Time: 10:57:36 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.121

Comments

Hi Fauzia and Ali, Apologies for waiting until the last day to comment on your wonderful paper. Of course, I'm biased, since you used an adaptation of my POSHA. :-) I wanted to add a few comments. The results that you report from POSHA items (not all of your questionnaire) were quite similar to those we have seen from a number of other countries. Several of the queries asked about/commented on other places that might be surveyed. At West Virginia University, we have the International Project on Attitudes Toward Human Attributes (IPATHA), and the Public Attitude Survey of Human Attributes (POSHA) is the instrument we have developed to measure public opinion (attitudes) toward stuttering and other attributes such as mental illness, obesity, etc. anywhere in the world. We have pilot data from 12 countries (and 2-3 more in the works), 8 languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Arabic---and more soon). There have been some interesting differences across some of the samples, but as someone pointed out in the discussion of this paper, the similarities outweigh the differences. In the Al-Khaladi et al. paper cited, for example, data from their survey suggest that "an act of God (Allah)" was rated higher as a cause of stuttering in Kuwait than most other places we have sampled. In Turkey, we found that a convenience sample (surveys given to friends, acquaintances, and colleagues) were similar to many others around the world, and "Act of God" as a cause was scored low, By contrast, when we used a probability sample, the data were similar to those from Al-Khaledi....There is much yet to do, but it is clear that public opinion is important in the EXPERIENCE of stuttering as clearly illustrated in this study. Even if half or more of the teachers might have been sympathetic, too many are not. In the future, research needs to be done, using a standard instrument like the POSHA wherein data exist from lots of sites, to determine what strategies might be most effective in changing attitudes.....Again, this was a great study. Congratulations! Ken


Last changed: 10/22/09