Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
interpretative activities. Not the least of these arose in my administration of the
interview schedule. As I was interviewing my respondents, I was struck by the need to
go beyond my questions in various unforeseen ways so as to obtain the sort of answers
I wanted’.
Antaki and Rapley (1996) suggest that how we make sense in interview conversations necessarily
relies on everyday conversational skills that cannot be reduced to reliable techniques. The
anthropologist, Michael Moerman (1974) observed how people categorized their world but soon
realized that without a set of animating questions, attempts to describe things are doomed to failure.
Facts never speak for themselves! Baker (1982) says when we talk about events we give them a
particular character. Interviewer and interviewee actively construct some version of the world, raising
issues about data:
1.What is the relation between interviewees’ accounts and the world they describe? Are accounts
potentially true or false?
2.How is the relation between interviewer and interviewee to be understood? Is it governed by
standards of good practice (whatever that is) or based on conversation conventions we employ daily?
Answers are provided by three philosophies:
Positivism - generates valid, reliable facts from a random interview sample, using standard questions
with easily tabulated multiple-choice answers. The problem is that responses are framed and delivered
at different descriptive levels.
Emotionalsim - generates data giving insights into people’s experiences through unstructured, openended
interviews. Retrospective study poses problems in penetrating private worlds successfully.
Constructionism - generates data on how interviewees construct narratives of places, people and events,
treating the mutually constructed meaning as a topic. Participant conversational skills rather than
spoken content may be relied on.
All three philosophies offer strengths, respected in the method chosen to gain information from the
four course participants. A structured interview was chosen to allow across subject comparisons, using
open questions, which allowed the participant to choose their response narrative in a setting that was
comfortable and relaxed. Thus, the weaknesses of the interview are ameliorated by a systematic
procedure that allows us to reflect on the life history of respondents, in the best way possible to
produce client-centred approaches to intervention and target lines of investigation in research. The
structured design aimed to give the procedure validity and reliability.
4. Case studies using the interview method
Case studies allowed participants to present their views on stammering and although these were
collected in a survey of 200 participants on fluency courses, the numerical data merely revealed weight
of opinion rather than a view of real life events. Participants for interview were chosen at random from
each decade of a 9-day Fluency Course, at the Apple House, Oxford. The reason for this was to judge
whether issues changed over the 32 year period. They form part of a research project to record and
review management of adult dysfluency at Oxford (Sage, 1998). Therapy was initiated in 1964 by Dr
Seymour Spencer, psychiatrist, and Catherine Renfrew, chief speech therapist, within a research
framework that monitored a component approach to treatment (speech fluency methods) which later
incorporated a contextual focus using ideas from cognitive therapy to deal with problems surrounding
stammering. The senior speech therapist, Gerda Wilson, was in charge for 32 years, and assisted by
Sylvia Davey, voice specialist. Gerda Wilson’s achievement was recognized in 1996, by the
International Association of Therapists and Counselors, when she was awarded the European Educator
of the Year, and in 1998 when she received the Diana, Princess of Wales Award for Human
Communication.
The interview subjects (names changed for confidentiality)
Paul, Robert, John and Helen joined the course during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s
respectively.
The Method
Each person was questioned on 7 standard questions that were intended to generate valid, reliable,
narrative, comparative data independent of the research setting. The questions were:
1. What are your first memories about stammering?
2. Do you see your stammer as an issue for life?
3. How do you think about your stammer?
4. How has your stammer affected you most?
5. What made you seek help for your stammer?
6. Can you tell me how the Apple House course has helped you?
7. Did all the good things started at the Apple House continue for you?
The final question was intentionally a leading one. All participants had answered a questionnaire as
part of a random cohort of 200 out of 800, who had attended the Apple House Fluency Course. This
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