Students who stutter think that their college professors perceive them less positively than students who don’t stutter

 

How do students who stutter (and those who don’t) think that their college professors perceive them? The March 2021 issue of the Journal of Fluency Disorders contains an article by Danielle Werle and Courtney T. Byrd titled College professors’ perception of students who stutter and the impact on comfort approaching professors. They surveyed 246 adult students, half who stuttered and the other half who did not. Participants were asked to rank how they believed professors perceived them regarding sixteen traits on a scale ranging from zero to one hundred. Seven traits are positive: Bold, Bright, Calm, Competent, Intelligent, Open, Self-Assured. The other nine traits are negative: Aggressive, Dull, Incompetent, Mediocre, Nervous, Passive, Reticent, Self-conscious, Shy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2 of the article listed the ranks for sixteen traits, as shown above in alphabetical order via a bar chart. For six traits indicated by asterisks (Incompetent, Nervous, Open, Self-assured, Self-conscious, and Shy) there were statistically significant differences between stutterers and non-stutterers. Four of those traits (Incompetent, Nervous, Self-conscious, and Shy)  are negative, and stutterers had higher rankings than non-stutterers. The other two, Open and Self-assured are positive and non-stutterers had higher rankings than stutterers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second bar chart plots the differences in rank (stutterers minus non-stutterers). They rank as follows: Nervous* 21.41, Shy* 21.04, Self-conscious* 20.97, Reticent* 11.48, Incompetent* 10.55, Dull 7.54, Passive 6.07, Mediocre 4.87, Intelligent 1.09, Aggressive 1.06, Bright -1.33, Bold -4.67, Calm -9.92, Competent -10.6, Open* -13.31, Self-assured* -17.93. For Competent and Incompetent the absolute value of the difference is almost identical.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The choice of traits for this survey has an obvious flaw. The analysis did not compare two obvious opposites – Competent and Incompetent. Examination of the bar chart reveals other sets of opposites (as indicated above): Aggressive and Passive, Bold and Shy, Bright and Dull or Intelligent , Calm and Nervous, Competent and Incompetent, and Self-Assured or Self-Conscious. An obvious way to do this is by flipping the scale over to compare Competent versus [100 – Incompetent]. A third bar chart shows the six sets of opposite traits together. There really are just nine independent traits. I found those sets described in a 2007 article in the Journal of Fluency Disorders (Volume 32, pages 297 to 309) by Sean P. MacKinnon et al that is titled Origins of the stuttering stereotype: Stereotype formation through anchoring adjustment. Their Table 1 has 25 items on semantic differential scales, including aggressive-passive, shy-bold, intelligent-dull, nervous-calm, and self-conscious – self-assured (but not competent -incompetent).

 

 What about impact on comfort when approaching professors? All students were asked a Yes/No question – whether they felt comfortable approaching their professor to discuss their performance on oral presentations. (Those who stutter also were asked some other questions). A logistic regression model for that Yes/No question found only the trait Self-assured had a significant coefficient for prediction. Their results section mentioned testing from the statistical problem of multicollinearity (when two related variables both are competing to predict a result). But that problem instead needed to be discussed back when the questions were chosen.