Stuttering is a complex speech and language disorder. Individuals who stutter individuals face not only deviant acoustic behaviors and their accompanying physical and behavioral expressions, but also emotional, communicative, and social distress fueled by their pronounced negative attitude toward their speech and consequently toward themselves as communicators. Early addressing of negative or unconstructive beliefs, emotions, and behaviors in connection with one's speech thus represents an important part of a multidimensional approach in stuttering therapy. Recently, around the world, many therapeutic approaches have been established in this field and they include elements of creative media or art therapy, including drama therapy and therapeutic story(telling).
In this master's thesis, I explored the use and impact of art therapy in therapy, aimed at encouraging the formation of a positive attitude towards one's speech of children who stutter, and the influence those approaches have on the quality of children’s communication attitude. I examined the possibilities of integrating various elements of art therapy (with the method of therapeutic story and the use of various creative media in stuttering therapy prevailing) – especially in that part of therapy that addresses individual beliefs and feelings about themselves as a failed communicator or an incompetent, unwanted participant in social communication situations. Based on theoretical findings, research and examples of good practice, I designed a creative art therapeutic program (abbreviated CAT program) for children who stutter and attend the 3rd and 4th grades of primary school. It was conducted in the form of workshops that promote individual's communicative self-confidence, positive self-image and allow recognizing, exploring, and changing attitude towards one’s speech in a creative and fun way.
The influence of the use of the therapeutic story and selected elements of art therapy in therapy aimed at improving the attitude towards one's speech in stuttering children was analyzed through participants' self-evaluations, self-reflection of the implemented program, and triangulation of opinions, which summarizes the final observations regarding the communication attitude of the participants, their parents, another professional from the field of special education Nina Milavec (external observer), and my observations. To determine the change in the attitude towards one's speech among the participants of the CAT program, I prepared a questionnaire about the attitude towards one's speech, designed according to the model of reference instruments such as A-19 (Guitar and Grims, 1977), BAB (CAT subtest, Brutten and Vanryckeghem, 2003) and OASES (Yaruss and Quesal, 2010). Numerical results obtained through the questionnaire were analyzed using basic statistical procedures. With qualitative analysis, I formed introspective reports from my therapeutic diary entries, following the example of the authors Š. L. Knoll and C. Knoll (2009).
Qualitative analysis of the data shows that the use of therapeutic story and selected elements of art therapy significantly contribute to improving the attitude towards one's speech, while quantitative analysis shows that this has an impact on improving the attitude towards one's speech in stuttering children in some aspects. Due to the small size and lower representativeness of the sample, a more accurate quantitative analysis, which would give a more scientifically substantiated conclusion, could not be performed this time. Further research might be needed.
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