EST in progress - The multidisciplinary survey

One of the working packages for the EST project addresses the development of national guidelines for stuttering treatment for kindergarten children. In order to do so, we first wanted to know the current status quo in Norway. Children at the age of 1 to 5.6 years usually attend kindergarten in Norway. Hence, kindergarten teachers are one of the professions that are very close to children on an every day base as earlier described by Hilde Hofslundengen’s blog post. In addition, health care nurses see all children at certain ages and are trained to observe typical development and to initiate follow ups if needed, as described in a blog post by Elisabeth Holm Hansen.

Illustration from Pexel

Speech-language pathologists are usually first involved after concerns have been raised, either by their parents or by those working in the profession, that that they may have a difficulty/disorder. So far so god. However, we are curious to explore what those three different professions (kindergarten teachers, health care nurses and speech-language pathologists) actually do when they meet a child that may stutter or are contacted by worried parents and caregivers.  Since there are no common guidelines today, that processionals have different educational backgrounds and that there are geographical differences in service offers in Norway, we expect a variation in practice and experience across the involved professions.

Therefore, we have prepared a multidisciplinary survey covering questions as for example, Have you met any children that stutter?, What do you do when a parent is concerned about their child’s possible stutter? and Does your workplace have any strategies or guidelines for addressing stuttering questions?

We prepared three different surveys, one for each profession - kindergarten teachers, health care nurses and speech-language pathologists. All surveys include a number of common questions across professions as well as some profession specific questions.

The surveys were sent out in first part of November. Right now, we are both exited over every new answer we receive  (THANK YOU!) and still a bit nervous if we reach the threshold for total numbers needed to have a representative sample to.

Therefore, if you have received an invitation to answer the survey in any of the professional groups, please take the time to answer. Even though you may never have met a child that stutters in your profession, that is very important information for us about the Norwegian context. Hence, we encourage everybody to answer the survey so that we can prepare the most descriptive picture for Norway and the current situation for kindergarten children that stutter.

Illustration from Pexel