Members consultation - main page

In summer 2005 the BSA was in the process of developing a strategic plan to help define the direction and priorities of the Association over the next five to ten years. As a part of the process, Trustees and staff identified what they thought were the most important issues of concern, both for the Association and for people who stammer. These issues were grouped into eight key themes:

Campaigning for better speech and language therapy
Supporting research into therapies
Campaigning on behalf of preschool children
Supporting school-age children
Stammering in the workplace
The cost of stammering to society
Adapting to new technologies
Organisation of the BSA

The views of the membership (around 1600 persons at the time) were then sought via a postal questionnaire. The detailed issues were listed under each key theme and members were asked to rank each theme on a 5-point scale of importance, where importance could be either for the BSA, for the respondent as a person who stammers or as a parent of a stammering child or as a speech and language therapist. They were also invited to add comments.

The BSA received nearly 100 responses to this appeal - a healthy response rate considering the complexity of the enquiry.

Summary of survey results - pdf file, based on a Powerpoint presentation.
This pdf has a set of three pages/slides for each theme, starting with the lowest ranked themes (joint 7th). The first page of each set shows the issues which were listed on the questionnaire to describe the theme in question. The second page shows the distribution of responses, where code 1 means 'unimportant', through to code 5 meaning 'very important'. The third page summarises the comments given by respondents. An attempt has been made to include both positive and negative comments and also to include any ideas put forward by respondents. An importance score was generated for each theme, using the 5-point scale, and the themes were ranked on the basis of this score. The final page shows the distribution of respondents, ie people who stammer (PWS), speech and language therapists (SLT) etc.

Velda Osborne, October 2007

Members consultation - main page