| Acquired motor speech disorders can lead to loss of intelligibility, or acceptability, of communication. This can cause restrictions to an individual's participation in personally relevant life activities, which may facilitate a decrease in quality of life and "change in identify and self-esteem" (Lowit, Miller, & Kuschmann, 2014, p. 51). The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is a holistic framework which can help facilitate rehabilitation plans and goals. Though comprehensive, containing over 1400 codes, the full ICF framework could be deemed difficult to apply (Bickenbach, Cieza, Rauch, Stucki, 2012). The WHO and the ICF Research Branch started the core set initiative in 2001 to investigate code relevance to specific health-related circumstances or contexts. This process is a research based multi-step methodology that considers various perspectives to create valid core sets. In this study, a web-based survey on the Qualtrics platform was utilized to look specifically at the speech-language pathologists' perspective on which codes are most relevant when working with an individual with acquired motor speech disorders. In addition, ethnographic interviews may confirm findings from the survey and provide more in-depth analysis of idiosyncrasies. A set of most relevant codes has been analyzed, and this research will serve as one of the studies needed for the creation of a comprehensive core set for acquired motor speech disorders. The core set creation allows for a more holistic outlook on an individual's life, and it also serves as a starting place for future evaluation and outcome measure tools to be created. |
