Measuring outcomes in children's speech and language disorders

This panel will discuss measuring outcomes in children’s speech and language disorders. Through the lens of Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), we will explore the opportunities and tensions in collecting outcomes that balance measuring linguistic/phonetic domains with outcomes that matter to children and families, such as communicative participation.
Literature on interventions for DLD and SSD reflect many inconsistencies in both which outcomes are measured and how they are measured. This makes it difficult to compare studies and determine which treatment approaches are most effective for which children. Moreover, outcome measures in intervention studies are currently skewed toward impairment-focussed and linguistic measures; do not necessarily reflect the wishes of key stakeholders; and may be difficult or too expensive for practitioners to implement in the evaluation of their services. More recent work underlines the critical role of children’s perspectives in shaping effective and meaningful speech and language therapy. Communicative participation should therefore also be prioritised as an outcome measure.
One way of standardising outcome measures for a clinical condition is to develop a Core Outcome Set (COS). COS provide a standardized framework to measure treatment efficacy, ensuring consistency and comparability across studies. However, standardising outcomes which can encompass all domains, and yet remain feasible for use, is extremely challenging, especially in an international context, where not only do languages differ, but cultural norms and health services are disparate.
This panel comprises researchers interested in developing outcome measures that can be used to determine the effectiveness of interventions for children with speech and language disorders. Contributors will present their own work on outcome design and implementation, before inviting all panel presenters and participants to discuss the challenges and opportunities of designing and implementing outcome measures which encompass both impairment-based (linguistic) and communicative participation outcomes.