Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL
Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL
Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL
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RESEARCH COMMENTARY ON SAGE<br />
<strong>Stammering</strong> <strong>Research</strong>. Vol. 1.<br />
On reaching the parts that quantitative researchers cannot:<br />
Commentary on Sage, R. (2004) “How interviews with adults who<br />
stammer inform research directions”<br />
Paul Stenner<br />
Department of Psychology<br />
University College, London<br />
P.Stenner@ucl.ac.uk<br />
Abstract. The issues raised by Sage (2004) are discussed from the perspective of qualitative research in<br />
general. While highlighting the importance of this approach to the examination of practical issues, some ways<br />
in which the approach could be taken forward in this application area are discussed. Keywords: Qualitiative<br />
approaches to stuttering.<br />
A quick glance at the ever-growing number of new books, journals and articles on qualitative<br />
methods makes it patent that the attitudes of social and psychological researchers have ‘softened up’<br />
somewhat to the soft end of the knowledge industry. One clear marker of this is that the British<br />
Psychological Society, in their wisdom, insist that a recognized Psychology Degree must involve<br />
instruction in qualitative methods. As a social psychologist with some interest in qualitative research<br />
techniques I am, naturally enough, positively inclined towards arguments in support of their use. I am<br />
especially enthusiastic about work that demonstrates the practical benefits that can flow from a<br />
qualitative investigation.<br />
But the flip-side of this feel-good story of increasing presence is a story of decreasing value. The joy<br />
of the growing acceptability of qualitative research is thus mixed with a certain worry about standards.<br />
This combination, of course, is all too familiar in other domains of life, and I do not hesitate to call it<br />
inflation. In this context, qualitative researchers are obliged to reflect critically upon the quality of their<br />
own work, and that of others. In doing so, however, it quickly becomes apparent that clear guidelines<br />
for the conduct and reporting of qualitative research, where they exist, are woefully inadequate. In a<br />
classic text on discourse analysis, for example, we are informed that the analytic process is “like riding<br />
a bicycle”! (a description destined to confuse the more literal minded of our colleagues). Joking apart,<br />
there is some merit in such refusals to prescribe, since more directive instructions typically succeed in<br />
removing performance anxiety only at the risk of defeating the object of the research. Insisting upon<br />
procedures for testing diachronic reliability (the stability of a finding over different time-periods) when<br />
one’s aim is phenomenological description, for instance, might be counterproductive. Ensuring that<br />
one’s data speak directly to a clearly stated hypothesis, to give a second example, might be poor advice<br />
if “over the course of the study one discovers what the research is about” (Sage, 2004). It must be<br />
acknowledged, therefore, that a certain amount of anxiety is included in the price the qualitative<br />
researcher must pay for their valued ‘softness’ 1 .<br />
On reading Rosemary Sage’s paper “How interviews with adults who stammer inform research<br />
directions” I experienced exactly the combination of joy and worry described above. I find articulating<br />
the ‘positives’ the easy part, and so will start with them. The aims of the research are clearly stated and<br />
highly commendable. The research, that is, was designed to inform a research and practice agenda of<br />
direct relevance to those who stammer. Given 50% relapse rates following intervention, there is a clear<br />
need to do something deceptively simple and astonishingly rare in scientific circles: to talk to the<br />
clients about what they consider their problems to be and about what they find helps them. Naturally,<br />
compared to high-tech research programmes deploying PET, FMRI and other state-of-the-art<br />
technologies, this research agenda cannot help but to appear somewhat antiquated. Nevertheless, as<br />
Sage’s research illustrates, this natural attitude towards big-science should not bewitch us into<br />
forgetting that phenomena such as stammering are never just mechanical faults of the human biological<br />
machine. People that stammer are also beings that are thoroughly implicated in the complex networks<br />
of communication that make up our social worlds. Further, they are conscious psychological beings<br />
with self-identities, biographies and anticipated futures. <strong>Stammering</strong> and its perpetuation are invariably<br />
wrapped up in these complex and variable social and psychological circuits of communicated and uncommunicated<br />
meaning. The most direct way of discovering how – even in the 21 st Century - is to<br />
listen, in a disciplined way, to the stories of those who stammer.<br />
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