Bouncing back: The role of resilience in therapy for school-aged children who stutter

Abstract

Purpose: Recent investigations into the area of resilience have applied a risk-and-protective factor model, allowing for the identification of risks, while also identifying positive contextual, social, and individual factors that facilitate individual resilience (Zimmerman, Stoddard, Eisman, Caldwell, Aiyer, and Miller, 2013). Adolescents who stutter are at risk for poor socialemotional development due to adverse speaking experiences and subsequent emotional responses from stuttering. The primary purpose of this pilot investigation was to examine the impact of a specialized group fluency program on promoting resiliency in adolescents who stutter. The secondary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between resilience and overall impact of stuttering.Methods: Five adolescents who stutter ranging from ages 9-17 participated in an 8-week group fluency program, which aimed to increase resiliency by targeting three protective factors known to promote resiliency: self efficacy, social functioning, and peer support. To measure the change in resiliency following intervention, participants completed the The Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) preceding and following intervention. The correlation between resiliency and the overall impact of stuttering was evaluated through post-test analyses of the Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering (OA-SES) and CYRM-28 scores.Results: Results indicated a statistically significant increase in resilience and a moderate negative correlation between the CYRM-28 and OASES.Conclusions: These findings suggest that participation in a specialized, group intervention program can enhance resilience in adolescents who stutter and, consequently, decrease the overall impact of stuttering in their lives.