[Next]
From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/15/00
Time: 1:35:16 PM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.51
Dear Nancy,
You’re welcome! I’m glad you found useful information in the paper.
It is disappointing for us to discover that people are fearful or unsure about stutterers. While it is understandable that parents would be concerned about external negative influences on their young children (take the influence of drugs or satanism, for example), we know that stuttering is not "catching." Educating people about the realities and myths regarding stuttering is a necessary part of changing erroneous views and negative attitudes, but education is, by no means, a guarantee of success.
Indeed, the IPATS initiative is designed to provide a tool for those who are involved in public education campaigns regarding stuttering that they can use to assess the effectiveness of their efforts. By giving the yet-to-be revised POSHA before and after a campaign, the educators could get a sense of what was most and least effective.
We had not contemplated the use of our pilot data in the design of curricula for general public education, but you have raised a good point. We will be publishing data on over 500 respondents from WV, NJ, AZ, NC, PA, Canada, South Africa, Denmark, Bulgaria, and hopefully Venezuela and China on the experimental version of the POSHA. As that data becomes available, we would be delighted if people like you would share relevant parts of the data with those who are in charge of public school curricula.
Thanks for your comments.
Ken