How Do Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) Know? A Survey of SLPs' Disciplinary Epistemology.

Seventy people answered, recruited by convenience and snowball sampling including the lead researcher's own social media, and the authors describe the sample as small and non-representative. The proportions describe these respondents, not SLPs as a profession. Respondents were mostly White women, Masters-prepared, Canadian-trained and working in Western Canada. The survey was available in English only, which the authors give as one reason SLPs working in French in Quebec were largely out of reach. Some groups of questions did not hold together well, with reliability as low as 0.338, so the ratings for learning by doing, learning for doing and scientific approaches in particular rest on shaky ground. All questions were optional and no identifiers were collected, so response numbers vary from question to question and the researchers could not follow up on surveys that were started but not completed. One importance question was left out by mistake, some wording was reported as unclear, and the authors note that a way of knowing is an abstract idea that respondents had to interpret alone online, without the chance to talk it through with others. This records what SLPs say about how they learn, not what they actually do in a clinic.

No funding was received for this work, and the authors report no declarations of interest.

Do not read this as SLPs turning away from research. Most agreed that formal studies matter to their learning, and the claim they rejected was only that numbers are more useful than descriptions. Nor is this a picture of the profession: 70 self-selected SLPs answered, almost all White women trained in Canada and working in the west, and what people say about how they learn is not the same as how they learn in a clinic.