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Re: Public attitudes toward stuttering

From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/14/02
Time: 12:16:54 PM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.205

Comments

Hi Ed,

Thanks for your interest in public attitudes. Let me try to address at least two of your three questions.

What methods have I used to address public attitudes? I have been working with a wonderful group of people including Scott Yaruss, Bobbie Lubker, Glenn Tellis, Jaan Pill, and Charlie Diggs to design and field-test the first version of a survey instrument that could measure public attitudes towards stuttering. With the help of professionals from several places in the USA and from several countries around the world--along with about a dozen of my students--we have carried out pilot studies at 13 different sites in the USA, Canada, Denmark, Bulgaria, Turkey, Nicaragua, and South Africa. The questionnaire asks people to rate reactions, thoughts, and impressions to stuttering, mental illness, overweight, wheelchair use, old, left handed, good talker, multilingual, and intelligent.

What have we found? It is too soon to say too much, but in general we discovered that the general public everywhere we have sampled views stuttering almost as negatively as being mentally ill, and more negatively than being confined to a wheelchair. Surprisingly and depending on how the questions are worded, being someone who is overweight is sometimes regarded as the most negative of the nine human attributes. (I suspect this reflects a good bit of ignorance about stuttering and mental illness.)

We have not looked at attitude change over time, but that could begin to occur once we have completed the arduous process of developing the survey instrument, which we call the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes (POSHA).

Stay tuned for a few years....

Ken


Last changed: September 14, 2005