A Preliminary Report on Outcomes of the American Institute for Stuttering Intensive Therapy Program

Abstract

In this study, we documented the effects of a 3-week, intensive stuttering treatment program on overt and covert symptoms of stuttering and participants’ levels of social anxiety. This study was a preliminary report in which we used a single-group pretest-posttest design to analyze outcomes data with reference to each participant individually and described general group trends. Researchers gave 5 adult participants who stuttered a battery of self-report instruments and collected speech samples before and after treatment. We found that disfluencies lessened considerably for all participants, although most continued to stutter at levels above those of normally fluent speakers. All participants except for 1 were far less negatively affected by stuttering after treatment and greatly reduced their reported levels of social anxiety. Several participants in this sample displayed pathological levels of social anxiety pretreatment. Preliminary data indicate that this intensive program generally achieved its stated goals of facilitating improved stuttering/speech management and psychological/attitudinal management. We need further investigations to document the durability of the gains reported herein, as well as the clinical implications of social anxiety as a comorbid condition in some persons who stutter.