The Communication Attitude Test - A Concordancy Investigation Of Stuttering And Nonstuttering Children And Their Parents

This study was designed to determine if the view of parents, as to their children\u27s attitudes toward speech, was consistent with that of their offspring. Toward this end, a Dutch version of the Communicative Attitude Test (CAT-D) was administered to 55 Belgian grade school stutterers and nonstutterers and each of their parents. For both groups, the correlations between the children\u27s CAT-D Score and those of either their mother or their father was low ranging from + .28 to + .34, though statistically significant. Statistical analysis also revealed that the parents of the children who stuttered viewed their offsprings\u27 attitude toward speech as significantly more negative than their children did. The parents of the nonstutterers, on the other hand, felt that their child\u27s speech-associated belief system was more positive than their children reported. Taken together, the data suggest that, with respect to the communication attitude of children as measured by the CAT-D, parents do not appear to be worthy surrogate informants. In this regard, there is reason to believe that the reports of parents cannot be used to adequately predict the speech-associated attitude of their children