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From: Ellen-Marie Silverman
Date: 10/13/00
Time: 8:41:27 PM
Remote Name: 205.188.192.179
I appreciate your concern for people with stuttering problems and those who care about them when you refer to the disappointing results of research directed toward their needs.
Empirical research conducted in the USA during the past 80 years or so certainly has yielded precious little information easily transported into therapuetic strategies for children and adults. From my perspective, the problem rests with the underlying model. The assumptions underlying the statistical model usually can't be met, while the data collection procedures stemming from application of the model, i.e., selecting individual variables to study, are at odds with the fairly well accepted view that what makes humans human is a fairly complex interaction of behavior, cognition, and emotion. Essential human behavior can not be described accurately let alone understood by a reductioinist approach.
What we need more of is clinical research, naturalistic research, revealing the on-going problem solving efforts involved in focused change as well as an in depth account of the consequences of the described interactions. In the meantime, given that there is some reasonable information fairly readily available to parents, children, teens, and adults concerned about stuttering and some equally substantiated information about the varieties of human learning and how to best structure new learning, clinicians in partnership with those seeking their help should be able to establish helpful programs of change for those who want to do that without waiting for empirical researchers to tell them how.
Our journals need to be much more responsive to the writing of clinicians. They need encouragement to present programs of intervention in a descriptive, thorough manner ala writings of Piaget, Jung, Einstein, and others. And our training programs need to recognize that their objective is train effective clinicians, which they can do more effectively if they stress and reward clinical problem-solving to the same extent they admire empirical research conducted by individuals with limited, and sometimes no, clinical experience.
Perhaps, I should not hang out SLP's dirty laundry in this forum. Then maybe I should. At any rate, there is no reason that, given the nature of some reliable information currently available about the nature of stuttering, language development, communication skills development, and human learning, that dedicated clinicians working closely with people seeking their help can not provide amelioration of stuttering to some extent and do no harm in the process.
Ellen-Marie Silverman