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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 05 Oct 2012
Time: 13:24:11 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.121
Hello Tim, You ask some good questions. Let me respond to the first one in this post. You asked, "How is stuttering perceived in different cultures around the world?" With a large number of colleagues or "partners" around the world, I have led the International Project on Attitudes Toward Human Attributes, an initiative designed primarily so far to explore public attitudes toward stuttering worldwide. I developed the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes-Stuttering (POSHA-S) and have published studies on reliability, validity, translatability, user-friendliness, online vs paper-and-pencil sampling, convenience vs probability sampling, etc. There is no way I can answer simply because each of the more than 150 different samples we have analyzed so far is different. Nevertheless, let me try to offer a few summary statements of what I have learned so far. (1) Public attitudes toward stuttering appear to be overall more similar than different around the world. (2) That said, there are important differences in different samples, such as those from the West (North America & Western Europe) vs. those from other regions (e.g., Cameroon, Nepal, India, China, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey). (3) Although too soon to say for sure, a number of predictors are emerging. It appears that educational level of respondents is a fairly consistent predictor of positive (accurate, sensitive) attitudes. So, too are occupational status and relative income, but not as strong. Knowledge of stuttering from personal experience as a stutterer or a parent of a stuttering child results in the best attitudes on average that we have seen to date. Future speech-language pathologists (i.e., SLP students) have better attitudes than those inherent in other college students. Also, as SLP students move from undergraduate to graduate status, their attitudes improve, possibly even before adding further coursework. Coursework in fluency disorders can, but may not always, improve students' attitudes. Focused information on stuttering (talks about stuttering, DVDs about stuttering, stories of people who stutter) also can improve attitudes in high school and adult respondents at least temporarily. (4) The sex of adult respondents has very little effect on stuttering attitudes. The sex of the hypothetical stutterer may have some effect on attitudes, at least in some cultures. I am currently exploring this further. (5) In one carefully controlled study in Turkey using representative samples, attitudes of 6th grade children were virtually the same as the attitudes of their parents, grandparents, and adult neighbors. (6) The language of the questionnaire, if properly translated and then back-translated to English appears to make no difference in the responses. Those are some of our findings. If you want to see more, you can visit my website at www.stutteringattitudes.com. Best, Ken