Client-clinician relationships and concomitant factors in stuttering therapy

Interrelationships among client progress in stuttering therapy, the nature of the affect interchange between client and clinician, and certain personality characteristics of both client and clinician were studied. Sixteen young adult male stutterers and their 11 graduate student clinicians served as subjects. Results support observations that the clinicians' and clients' personalities are significant variables in the stuttering therapy situation, support observations that important similarities exist between stuttering therapy and psychotherapy, and suggest that it is more accurate to note stages in the therapeutic relationship, rather than to characterize the relationship as if it were the same throughout therapy.

The relationship of adaptation and consistency to improvement in stuttering therapy

For 33 stutterers of at least average severity, two measures of adaptation and one of consistency were made prior to any therapy at the Iowa Speech Clinic. This study tested the hypothesis that high adaptation and low consistency scores are related to improvement in stuttering therapy. Each measure was correlated with three criteria of improvement (increase in rate of utterance, decrease in frequency of disfluencies, and decrease in judged severity) over a year’s continuous therapy. The hypothesis received partial support, though correlations were too small to be of any clinical significance. One need in future work is to improve the reliability of measurement.