Staff Perceptions of the Communicative Competence of Adult Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Communication problems appear to be a defining feature of people with severe learning disabilities. For example, nearly all attenders at a day centre in Avon were judged to have communication difficulties which required speech and language therapy (van der Gaag and Dormandy, 1993). These include problems with speech production, receptive and expressive language and with the pragmatics of communication. All three aspects contribute to a person’s communicative competence. Hence assessing this can be a complex undertaking; particularly as the context in which assessments are made can have a strong influence on the person’s behaviours (Light, 1989). Important data, specifically from personnel who regularly interact with individuals on a daily basis is therefore commonly sought from parents and direct care staff to augment assessments made by therapists. However the use of informants presupposes that they are capable of giving reliable information. Remarkably few studies have tested this. The one most pertinent to the present study is that undertaken by van der Gaag (1989a) in which she contrasted the ratings given by care staff with those of speech and language therapists on a number of communicative functions such as giving information, initiating conversation and describing feelings. Correlations between the two groups, although significant, accounted for less than 50% of the variance in the ratings and percentage agreements on specific communication functions such as describing feelings, were only around 75%. By contrast therapist-therapist agreements exceeded 90% while those between two carers were just above 70%. Likewise, Blackwell et al. (1989) found that parent carers rated the communication behav-