An Australian survey of parent involvement in intervention for childhood speech sound disorders

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate how speech-language pathologists (SLPs) report involving parents in intervention for phonology-based speech sound disorders (SSDs), and to describe the home practice that they recommend. Further aims were to describe the training SLPs report providing to parents, to explore SLPs’ beliefs and motivations for involving parents in intervention, and to determine whether SLPs’ characteristics are associated with their self-reported practice.

Method: An online survey of 288 SLPs working with SSD in Australia was conducted.

Result: The majority of SLPs (96.4%) reported involving parents in intervention, most commonly in providing home practice. On average, these tasks were recommended to be completed five times per week for 10 min. SLPs reported training parents using a range of training methods, most commonly providing opportunities for parents to observe the SLP conduct the intervention. SLPs’ place of work and years of experience were associated with how they involved and trained parents in intervention. Most (95.8%) SLPs agreed or strongly agreed that family involvement is essential for intervention to be effective.

Conclusion: Parent involvement and home practice appear to be intricately linked within intervention for phonology-based SSDs in Australia. More high-quality research is needed to understand how to best involve parents within clinical practice.

Keywords:

• Speech sound disorders
• parent involvement
• survey

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the SLPs who completed the questionnaire, and Annie McKenzie, Danielle Grayson, Therese Vella, Natalie Blackburn and Aimee Cramer for their useful comments when piloting the questionnaire. Thanks also go to the organisations that helped distribute the questionnaire.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing up of the article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2017.1356936