From: Anne Bothe
Date: 10/24/00
Time: 11:27:28 AM
Remote Name: 128.192.22.206
Interesting question! Without exception, I have had the most wonderful experiences in working with the families that I have worked with. Part of our informed consent procedures is always to explain that it's a study, that maybe none of these conditions will help your particular child, all of that -- but maybe it's just in the air or in the water in a university town, or more likely it's a self-selection bias in the parents who would call a university or respond to an ad from a university -- but they are wonderful and understanding and want to be doing whatever they can do to add to the knowledge based about this disorder. It also helps enormously in our case, see, that what we were doing was comparing three different treatment approaches that have all been recommended as treatments for children who stutter -- and also, using single-subject experimental designs means that we got the experimental data we needed in about 4-6 weeks from each family, and they knew that after that 4-6 weeks the treatment they would be getting would be the one that had been best for their child in the first 4-6 week "Stage One" of the experiment. In other words -- I've never had to explain to families that they are stuck in the control group for a year or anything like that -- I prefer to design experiments that don't do that to children or to families, because I think our literature makes it pretty clear that early treatment is preferable, all in all, to delayed treatment. But neat question, with lots of underlying important issues -- thanks.