Analyzing the Attitudes of Teachers in Spain Toward Stuttering.

The sample was recruited by convenience, through emailing schools and social media snowballing, and everything was self-reported, so these teachers may not represent Spanish teachers as a whole and the results may be shaped by who chose to answer. The subgroups by teaching role were very uneven in size, so comparisons between roles rest on small numbers of people. More of the sample worked in higher education than in the general teaching population. The design is cross-sectional, so it can only show which factors go together with better attitudes; it cannot show that training or experience caused the improvement. The Spanish version of the survey was newly translated for this study and tested for comprehension with only ten teachers.

The authors declare no conflict of interest. No funding source is reported in the article text supplied.

Do not read the above-average scores as evidence that schools in Spain are already supportive places for students who stutter. The same survey found that these teachers rarely named genetics as a cause of stuttering, that many still thought it was learned, caused by trauma or a symptom of a disease, and that their sources of information about stuttering ranked at the 9th percentile of the worldwide database. The link between training and better attitudes is cross-sectional, so this study cannot show that training is what improves them.