Office Hours: The Professor is In

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Re: Public attitudes toward stuttering

From:
Date: 10/20/02
Time: 1:04:32 PM
Remote Name: 142.161.128.92

Comments

Thank your for your response. Such surveys of public attitudes are long overdue, and the results of your pilot study contains serious implications for therapy as well as human rights legislation and its enforcement.

My view is that the conversational uses of the terms stuttering and stammering — all implying shame, failure, incompetence and the like — have something to do with the results you have found. Given the huge public ignorance about real stuttering, the conversational usages, and their negative implications, are the only frame of reference most people have regarding people who stutter.

Professionals in the treatment of stuttering, unfortunately, have tended to dismiss reports of what you have found in your pilot study from people who stutter as overly subjective — as are accounts of unfair social and vocational discrimination. At the same time these professionals have not found it important to determine scientifically what public attitudes really are.

The impression is left that the reason just might be some awareness that the results would present a serious challenge to what currently passes as adequate in the treatment of stuttering.

I fail to understand why we have to wait years for development of survey instruments. Let me suggest just a few common sense questions for such a questionnaire: — Do you know anyone who stutters? — Have you ever met a person who stutters? — Would you hire a person who stutters? — Would you mind having a person who stutters as a fellow employee? — Would you be concerned if your sister wanted to marry a person who stutters?"

And why should be have to wait years? Corporations, governments and political candidates pay for professional market research to find out what their image actually is, then they decide what they want it to be, and adopt strategies to change it to the desired one.

Maybe such organizations such as the NSA and SFA might commission such a survey on how society views stuttering. The answers could certainly help in the design of better stuttering therapy programs.


Last changed: September 14, 2005