Abstract
Background: Persistent calls for school‐based education about stuttering necessitate a better understanding of peer attitudes toward children who stutter and a means to measure outcomes of such educational interventions. Langevin and Hagler in Citation developed the Peer Attitudes Toward Children who Stutter scale (PATCS) to address these needs and gave preliminary evidence of reliability and construct validity.
Aims: To examine further the psychometric properties of PATCS and to examine the negativity of attitudes.
Methods & Procedures: PATCS was administered to 760 Canadian children in grades 3–6. Measures included reliability, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), a known groups analysis, convergent validity with the Pro‐Victim Scale of Rigby and Slee, and the negativity of attitudes.
Outcomes & Results: PATCS appears to tap a second‐order general attitude factor and three first‐order factors representing the constructs of Positive Social Distance (PSD), Social Pressure (SP), and Verbal Interaction (VI). In the known groups analysis, participants who had contact with someone who stutters had higher scores (more positive attitudes) than those who had not, and girls had higher scores than boys. PATCS correlated moderately (0.43, p<0.01) with the Pro‐Victim scale. Finally, one‐fifth (21.7%) of participants had scores that were somewhat to very negative.
Conclusions & Implications: Results provide evidence of the validity and reliability of PATCS and confirm the need for school‐based education about stuttering. The PSD and SP factors suggest that education include discussions about (1) similarities and differences among children who do and do not stutter in order to increase acceptance, and (2) making personal choices and handling peer pressure in thinking about children who stutter. The VI factor suggests that open discussion about stuttering may alleviate frustration experienced by listeners and provide the opportunity to give strategies for responding appropriately. Results also suggest that education involve contact with a person who stutters.
Notes
Notes
1. Participants were part of a larger intervention study; only the pre‐intervention questionnaires are utilized in this study.
2. The PATCS was always administered first because video players were not consistently available for whole class periods. The mean Pro‐Victim score of 4.04 in this study is comparable with Menesini et al.'s (Citation2003) graphed means of approximately 4.17 and 4.25 on two subscales in their eleven‐item version of the scale. They did not provide means for the third subscale or the total scale. This suggests that the inability to counterbalance administration of scales did not appear to affect the Pro‐Victim scores in this study unduly. For a comprehensive description of: (1) the selection of the CWS for the video‐tape, (2) the children's stuttering behaviours, and (3) a probe of potentially stigmatizing characteristics other than stuttering, see Langevin and Hagler (Citation2004). Other than stuttering, the CWS in the video looked like ‘normal’ kids to participants in the probe.
3. Available from the first author.
4. Nine questionnaires were excluded: four because they were not completed according to instruction, four because the participants indicated they had a stutter on the PATCS, which could not be verified, and one because the participant told the first author that she had a stutter, for which a referral was made.
5. These items were conceptually different from the others as they required participants: (1) to infer internal states (items 4 and 20), (2) to make judgements about personal characteristics of CWS (item 27), or (3) to make judgements about how others should treat CWS (item 23).
6. This method, albeit not universally accepted, conceptually implies that the random measurement error from relevant items have ‘something’ in common that is not represented in the model (Kline Citation1998). The covariances were allowed because it is believed that items 24 and 29 tap into similar emotions, and items 5 and 12 tap into similar peer conceptions of CWS.
7. Seventeen PATCS were removed from the full sample due to inconsistencies or missing data regarding the questions about contact with someone who stutters.
8. Because participants' attendance in the classes varied at times due to other commitments (e.g., individual tutoring), 20 participants did not complete the Pro‐Victim scale.
9. For a discussion about acceptable levels of reliability when test scores are used for making decisions about individuals, see Streiner and Norman (Citation2003). They suggest that such recommendations are tenuous since reliability is dependent on sample size.
10. Similarity of demographics is reflected in the following: 53.8% and 58.3% of participants were boys in the full and test–retest sample, respectively; four of the five grades and five of the seven ages in the full sample were represented in the test–retest sample; and 32.5% and 38.3% of the participants in the full and the test–retest samples, respectively, had had contact with someone who stutters.
11. Post‐hoc analysis of a two‐factor model comprised of a positive item factor (19 items) and a negative item factor (17 items) indicated that such a model was not an adequate fit to the data (χ2593 = 1465, χ2/d.f. = 2.47; GFI = 0.80; TL = 0.89; CFI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.063 [CI = 0.059–0.067]).