Pros And Cons Of Stuttering

In Davenport, Iowa in 1939, Dr. Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor decided to test the idea that stuttering was only caused by genetics. At the time, it was believed that stuttering could not be treated, and a person without a stutter could not develop a stutter. However, Dr. Johnson believed that a stutter could be made worse if it was labeled, and a labeling a child without a stutter as a stutterer could actually make them a stutterer. In the study, 22 orphans from a veteran’s orphanage were selected to participate. 10 of these children were labeled as a stutterer by their teachers and matrons before the study began. Tudor and 5 other graduate students then tested the 10 orphans and rated them on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being a poor speaker and 5 being fluent).

This assessment was compared to the teacher’s assessment and the 10 stutterer were split evenly between an experimental group (positive therapy group) and a control group (negative therapy group).

The other 12 participants were normally speaking children (no stutters) randomly selected from the orphanage. Six normally speaking children were put in the positive therapy group and the other six were put in the negative therapy group. During the experiment, the positive therapy group received positive feedback about their speech; they got encouragement and praise for their speech. Stutterers in this group showed signs of improvement and the normal speaking orphanage children in this group were not affected. However, the negative therapy group children were made more self-conscious about their speech, and they were lectured about their stuttering. The normal speaking children in this group showed signs of psychological trauma after the 5 month experiment and they developed lifelong speech problems. The stutterers in this group did not show any

improvement.
There are a lot of ethical problems in this study. First of all, there was harm done to the participants. Some of the normal speaking children in the control group were psychologically traumatized and some developed speech problems that lasted their whole life. Also, there was not any informed consent. The participants were forced to be in the study, and they were not aware about what the study was about. Finally, the participants were not debriefed at the end of the study; they did not find about they were a part of the study until 60 years later.
To research this topic ethically, a survey could have been done instead of an experiment. The researchers could have done a longitudinal study that started with very young stuttering children. The researchers could have asked the stuttering children parents’ their attitudes about stuttering and if they encourage their children or shame them about their stuttering. Also, the researchers could have examined shuttering children’s socio-economic status, IQ level, number of siblings, sex, etc. to see if there are patterns between the stutterers. All of this combined could help tell if nature or nurture is involved more in stuttering. Also, because it is a longitudinal study, the researchers could track if the stutterers become more or less fluent over time. In this study, no harm would be done to the participants, the parents would give consent to the study, and after the study, the parents and children could be debriefed.