This morning some of the CVC affiliates were reflecting on whether using parents as proxies for children's perspectives is enough. Here are a few quantitative studies I have been involved in that compare persapectives of children, parents, and professionals’
McCormack, J., McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2019). What do children with speech sound disorders think about their talking? Seminars in Speech and Language, 40(2), 94–104. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1677760
...This paper draws on data from the Sound Start Study in Australia to explore the attitudes toward talking of 132 preschool-aged children with SSD and the relationship between children's attitudes, speech accuracy, and parent-reported intelligibility and participation. The study revealed most of the children with SSD had a positive attitude toward talking. There was a significant relationship between children's attitudes toward talking and speech accuracy. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between speech accuracy and parents' perceptions of intelligibility and participation. However, there was no significant relationship between children's attitudes and parents' perceptions. These results highlight similarities and differences between attitudes and experiences of preschool-aged children, their performance on clinical measures, and their parents' perceptions, indicating the need for SLPs to consider each of these areas during assessment and intervention...
van Doornik, A., Franken, M. C., McLeod, S., Terband, H., & Gerrits, E. (2025). Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-001
...This study aims to improve our knowledge of how young children with speech sound disorders (SSD) perceive their own speech and communication in comparison with typically developing (TD) children and how these perceptions relate to parental judgment of communicative participation, intelligibility in different contexts, and an expert measure of children's speech accuracy (percentage of consonants correct in syllable initial position [PCCI]). Participants were 111 Dutch-speaking children (48–89 months old): 65 with SSD and 46 who were TD. Children's self-reports on the Dutch version of the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children Who Stutter (KiddyCAT-NL) were compared (a) between SSD and TD groups and (b) with the parents' ratings….Statistical analysis revealed that young children in the SSD group perceived their speech and communication differently than children in the TD group. Only in the SSD group was there a moderate positive correlation between speech accuracy and intelligibility in context and only a weak correlation with the child's perception of speech and communication. Parents' and children's perceptions were weakly correlated. Information on children's perception of their own speech is complementary to information obtained from the parents and SLPs' formal assessment of speech accuracy. To fully understand the impact of SSD, it is therefore important to actively elicit and include children's perspectives on speech and communication.
