The reanalysis of the study Social Validation of a Novel AAC Intervention for People with Aphasia

Abstract

By Mariah Emery, Communication Sciences and Disorders

Advisor: Aimee Dietz

Presentation ID: PM_B08

Abstract: Aphasia is a devastating language disorder often caused by a stroke. Social validation studies provide information on how peers perceive the helpfulness of a treatments designed to alleviate the communication challenges created by aphasia. The purpose of this study was to re-examine an extant data set to examine the social validation of a novel treatment designed to help individuals with aphasia use assistive technology to communicate. The initial analyses revealed that participants, 30 healthy age- and gender-matched adults perceived no differences in the quantity and quality of language in six people with aphasia during a story retell task using a communication app. However, these preliminary analyses only examined the overall average change for nine Likert Scale statements. In our retrospective analysis, we analyzed the mean change of each of the nine statements to determine if, perhaps, some of the individual statements captured pre- to post-treatment changes in the participants with aphasia. Unfortunately, no differences were noted. Upon further reflection, we believe that several factors may have contributed to these findings-despite the positive changes noted in the aphasia severity and language production of the patients. First, we believe that the length of the videos may have been too long.; each participant view 98 minutes of videos. Next, we suspect that the Likert statements could have been too broad and not well-aligned with the intended treatment targets. Future directions and clinical implications will be discussed during this poster presentation.