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From: Tom Weidig
Date: 02 Oct 2005
Time: 14:05:33 -0500
Remote Name: 83.99.98.152
Dear Ed, It is difficult to reply to your comment, as you are generalising and not refering to a specific example. My experience is different. Many research groups collect individual data from their experimental subjects in order to see whether some aspects like age, severity, or gender correlate with some observations. Sometimes the researchers only study subgroups. From the back of my mind, I can think a study by the group around Ingham which studied how female "stuttering" brains differ from male ones. From my own research, we collected many different aspects of patients of a fluency shaping therapy, and tried to find out which patients are most successful. However, we did not find anything, except severity, so the more you stutter before therapy the less likely you are fluent afterwards. Or I can think of research by Yairi and Ambrose (I think) where they found that kids with family history recover less often. So researcherstry to make distinctions, but it is hard to see any clear subtypes. Having said this, I believe that much research into stuttering is indeed flawed (but for different reasons), and many people conducting research lack the necessary scientific training and statistical know-how. Due to the complexity of stuttering, there are no clear answers to many issues, and people get away with a lot of sloppy thinking, unlike in computer programming where a minus left out crashes the system!