Qualitative research in communication disorders viii
many practitioners engaged with those with communication disabilities
2
.
We heard stories of misdiagnosis and misunderstanding of needs, about
practitioners too busy to listen carefully. In another study in Scotland, two
general practitioners said that working with people with communication
disabilities was like practising “vet medicine” because they could not tell you
what was being said and had to rely exclusively on physical examination
3
. This
type of information, so critical to informing service provision, is only really
available from qualitative research.
Historically speech and language therapists have often delivered services
from their clinics separate from other services, but now it is much more
common for them to be part of teams whether that be in hospices, hospitals,
day care, or schools. The members of these teams have very different roles but
all need to understand the individual and their communicative capacity. It is
very difficult to ask of this sort of provision “does it work?” because it is, by
its nature, so inherently complex. A more appropriate question is, what makes
a team work effectively? And this leads us to notoriously slippery concepts
such as collaboration and trust. At its root is the concept of social capital – the
relationships between the different individuals and the only way to get at social
capital is to adopt qualitative methods
4
. This type of research puts members
of the team on the same page and makes them feel that it is something that
they are collaborating in, or in modern parlance, ‘co-constructing’, rather than
having it done to them.
Of course, this interest in the qualitative paradigm is not new in
communication disabilities research as witnessed by early papers in the UK
5
and
2 Law, J., Bunning, K., Byng, S., Farrelly, S., & Heyman, B. (2005). Making sense in primary care: levelling the playing field for people with communication disabilities. Disability and Society, 20, 169‒185.
3 Law, J., Van der Gaag, A., & Symon, S. (2005). Improving communication in primary care: An
examination of the feasibility of introducing Health Talk: Count me in in two primary care practices.
Report to Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran Primary Care Trusts. Available from the first author c/o
School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne NE1 7RU, e:
[email protected]
4 McKean, C., Law, J., Laing, K., McCartney, E., Cockerill, M., Allon Smith, J., & Forbes, J.C. (2017).
A qualitative case study in the social capital of co-professional collaborative co-practice for children
with speech language and communication needs. International Journal of Language and Communication
Disorders. DOI: 10.1111/1460-6984.12296
5 Eastwood, J. (1988). Qualitative research: An additional research methodology for speech
pathology? International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 23, 171‒184.
DOI:10.3109/13682828809019885