Turkish validation of brief version of unhelpful thoughts and beliefs about stuttering-6

Stuttering in the form of voice, syllable or sentence repetition is a speech disorder that adversely affects the fluency of speech. Although many theories have been proposed regarding the etiology of stuttering, this issue remains unclear. From the stage of discovery of stuttering, stuttering avoidance behaviors begin to be acquired. Avoidance behaviors may cause symptoms such as sadness and anxiety and lead to social anxiety in advanced stages. In this study, our primary aim was to validate a Turkish version of the Brief Version of Unhelpful Thoughts and Beliefs About Stuttering-6 scale which was developed by the researchers of Sydney Institute of Stuttering to measure the anxiety levels of stuttering individuals. The original of the scale was translated into Turkish by three translators, and then three different translators transltaed scale back to English and faculties were observed. To select the most appropriate scale, three experts were asked to review the scale and 12 individuals were asked to score and comment on each item for clarity of the scale. The necessary corrections were made and Turkish validity and reliability of the scale was completed. The relationship between the severity of stuttering and anxiety levels are not clear. Although the researchers agree that stuttering may result with anxiety, there is no consensus on the level of anxiety associated with the level of stuttering severity. The other aim of the study was to observe the correlation between the Stuttering Severity Assessment-4 and the Brief Version of Unhelpful Thoughts and Beliefs About Stuttering-6(UTBAS-6), in which we validate its reliability and validity in the frame of this study. The study group consisted of 60 native Turkish people with stuttering who presented to Ege University Faculty of Medicine, Department of Otorhinolaryngology between September 2018 and January 2018 with speech disorder. For the control group, 30 participants were selected from native Turkish individuals who were not stuttering neither having another speech disorder. Individuals participated in the study were first filled out the validated version of the Brief Version of Unhelpful Thoughts and Beliefs About Stuttering-6 (KİYİDA-6), then 31 individuals selected from the case group were administered the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (KEŞİDA-4) protocol to determine the stuttering severity levels of those. Primarily, frequency tables containing numbers and percentages for the levels of each variable were generated from to the data obtained related to case and sham groups. Then, descriptive statistics were calculated for continuous sub-dimensions of scale, total score, age, age of onset and therapy hisory. Shapiro-Wilk Normality test was used to determine whether the data related to continuous variables were normally distributed. Since data were not distributed normally, Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare age, scale sub-scale and total scores of cases and control groups. The chi-square analysis were performed to evaluate categorical variables in case and sham groups. IBM SPSS Version 25.0 statistical package program was used in all statistical analyzes. The scores obtained from the Turkish-validated version of Brief Version of Unhelpful Thoughts and Beliefs About Stuttering-6 (KİYİDA-6) were compared with those obtained from the short and full version of UTBAS scales in terms of Cronbach's alpha values, inter-item reliability and sub-scale scores. The scores of the validated scale were quite close by to the full UTBAS and UTBAS-6 scores. As a result, a significant correlation was observed between KEŞİDA-4(SSI-4) and KİYİDA-6. A weak (0.38) correlation was found between KEŞİDA-4 and KİYİDA-6 scales. Although there was a low level of association between some of the demographic variables and KEŞİDA-4 and KİYİDA-6, no significant correlation was observed. Keywords: stuttering, KİYİDA-6, UTBAS-6, KEŞİDA-4, SSI-4, stuttering and anxiety