American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol.17 210-211 August 2008. doi:10.1044/1058-0360(2008/020)
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
Treatment Research
Laura Justice, Editor
The current context in which the speech and language community conducts its research is one that increasingly places a premium on the generation of knowledge that has direct bearing on the complex, multidetermined disorders we treat and the multifaceted environments in which we work. Practitioners and policy makers seek from the research community "usable knowledge" that offers direct translations to clinical practice—findings that can be readily embedded into the complex host environments in which communication disorders are identified and treated. While most if not all of the research published within AJSLP exemplifies the concept of "use-inspired research" (Stokes, 1997), treatment studies are those that typically have the most immediate potential for direct translation to clinical practice. We ought to be concerned if the volume of work produced by our research community is insufficient in its quality, quantity, or both.
Of the 13 research articles published thus far in Volume 17 of this journal, only 2 involved direct examination of treatment effects: one a feasibility study addressing treatment for aphasia (Cherney, Halper, Holland, & Cole, 2008) and the other an efficacy study addressing treatment for fluency disorders (Lewis, Packman, Onslow, Simpson, & Jones, 2008). This phenomenon is neither unique to AJSLP nor to the present volume, as ASHA journals historically have published far fewer treatment studies relative to other types of research.
I can provide a partial estimate of how much treatment research is being published in AJSLP. As part of a recent research activity, several colleagues and I examined a recent 10 volumes (40 issues from 1997 to 2006) of AJSLP to identify group-design treatment studies in speech-language pathology for a range of possible treatment foci (e.g., language, phonology, voice, fluency). In total, we found 13 such studies. (By way of comparison, we identified 12 such studies in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools and 28 in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research for the same time frame.) With respect to AJSLP, this clearly is not a suitable quantity if we consider that (a) this equates to an average of about one group-design treatment study published per year, (b) these treatment studies addressed a range of foci, and (c) these studies were not of uniformly high quality (Justice, Nye, Schwarz, McGinty, & Rivera, 2008). I appreciate that many other outstanding journals publish treatment studies concerned with disorders of communication, and that our review failed to capture the full range of research designs constituting treatment research (e.g., case study designs, single-subject designs). However, given that AJSLP is the premier journal of clinical practice in speech-language pathology in the United States, these data are troubling as they suggest that the volume of directly translatable knowledge produced in this journal is insufficient to bear the needs of clinical practice.
Why do we produce so little treatment research? I have no empirical answers to this question, but I surmise that at least in part it has to do with doctoral training. I suspect that some doctoral students shy away from pursuing treatment research, particularly at the dissertation stage, because they perceive it as being more time consuming than other types of research—requiring several weeks or months of treatment time coupled with other aspects of methodology. Couple this with the fact that relatively small numbers of those who train doctoral students conduct treatment research themselves, and supposing that doctoral trainees learn to do the kind of research that their mentors do, we no doubt have a pipeline problem making it unlikely we will ever produce suitable numbers of scholars to conduct treatment research.
These are issues that can be easily solved if the speech-language pathology community desires to increase the quantity and quality of treatment research produced. We can look, for instance, toward the field of educational sciences, which has vigilantly worked to increase the number of educational researchers who can effectively engage in evaluation research, giving pressing concerns regarding the need to know "what works" in educational practice. A new generation of educational researchers are currently being trained, supported through generous training grants from the Institute of Education Sciences to more than a dozen universities, who will be able to engage in multimethods research involving techniques of both hypothesis generation and hypotheses testing; these scholars will be able to engage in observational and descriptive work focused on knowledge building as well as efficacy and effectiveness work focused on identifying potentially causal relationships among education programs and pupil outcomes. While ensuring that doctoral trainees in speech-language pathology have sufficient depth of skill in particular research methodologies remains an important goal, these trainees must also have the breadth of methodological skill so that they can contribute to future treatment research that will address the complex and pressing needs that define clinical practice.
 |
References
|
|---|
Cherney, L. R., Halper, A. S., Holland, A. L., & Cole, R. (2008). Computerized script training for aphasia: Preliminary results. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 17, 19–34.
Justice, L. M., Nye, C., Schwarz, J., McGinty, A., & Rivera, A. (2008). Methodological quality of intervention research in speech-language pathology: Analysis of ten years of group design studies. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 2, 46–59.[CrossRef]
Lewis, C., Packman, A., Onslow, M., Simpson, J. M., & Jones, M. (2008). Phase II trial of telehealth delivery of the Lidcombe Program in early stuttering intervention. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 17, 139–149.
Stokes, D. E. (1997). Pasteur's quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Facebook 
Reddit 
Technorati 
Twitter What's this?
Top
References
