The influence of aphasia severity on how both members of a couple participate in an interview situation

Abstract

Background: One of the major impacts of aphasia is the social isolation of spouses and their partners with aphasia over time. This consequence may be related to a couple's discomfort in conversing with a third party. In an interview situation, spouses support their partner with aphasia in order to allow him/her to be included in the talk. It is likely that the participation of both members of couples depended on the degree to which the aphasia interfered.

Aims: The general aim of this research was to describe the influence of aphasia severity on the contributions of each member of a couple, one of them who had aphasia, in an interview situation.

Methods & Procedures: The twenty‐six couples with a member with aphasia were divided into three groups of different aphasia severities. Five couples constituted the control group. All couples were filmed in an interview. Number and types of spouses' contributions, their solicitation by the person with aphasia and their reaction and participation following the contributions were analyzed.

Outcomes & Results: Results showed that the severity of aphasia had a significant effect on both members of the couple participating in the interview. Groups of couples with aphasia and especially those with moderate and severe aphasia differed from groups of milder forms of aphasia and couples without communication limitations. The number of “speaking for” and “repair” behaviours produced by spouses and the reactions and participation of people with aphasia following these contributions also varied significantly with aphasia severity.

Conclusions: The results help us better understand how both couples with and without a member with aphasia engage in an interview. Moreover, these results may be clinically useful to support the development of treatment methods that include the spouse of people with aphasia.

Keywords:

• Aphasia
• Couples
• Severity
• Interview.

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec. The participants' involvement is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the speech‐language pathologists and the associations of people with aphasia who referred the participants to us. Claudia Morin carried out part of this research for her master's research project in Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Montreal.

Notes

1. Since the standard deviations were large, we redid all ANOVAs with the raw data converted by log transformations. As the results were nearly identical to those obtained without transformation of the data, only the results on the raw data are reported here.

2. In addition to the results presented in this article, other behaviours as defined by Croteau et al. (2007) were measured, such as support, but not analysed further because the mean scores for all groups were less than 2.