My Project

The successful development of children with communication delays may depend on their access both to specialized community assistance and extra resources within the family. In this project, researchers are examining the processes families use to decide whether to seek outside resources for their child and identify factors that enhance or discourage families’ ability to obtain community assistance. In addition, researchers are exploring how parents allocate resources within the family and how these distribution patterns may influence outcomes for children with communication delays and their siblings. Information is being gathered through a combination of interviews, questionnaires and standardized assessments. Families are be reassessed at yearly intervals in order to determine the developmental course of relevant family processes and child adjustment. Researchers hypothesize that the ways that families interact with community agencies may reflect the interactions occurring within the family itself.

This project should help us understand why some families successfully access community services for their children and others may not be able or willing to take advantage of these services. These findings may help organizations rethink service delivery options and their presentation to potential clients. In comparing resource access and allocation processes in families with children who have communication delays with those in families of children without such delays, researchers hope to identify family challenges and strengths that will be of special interest to speech professionals, as well as advancing our understanding of family interaction at a theoretical level.