A shortened version of the Southern Illinois university speech situation checklist for the identification of speech-related anxiety

This study investigated the ability of the 51-item Southern Illinois University Speech Situation Checklist (SSC) to differentiate stutterers known to have high levels of speech-related anxiety from nonstutterers with normal levels of speech- related anxiety. Checklist responses of 65 randomly selected subjects (33 stutterers and 32 nonstutterers) were subjected to a stepwise discriminant analysis. The analysis identified a combination of 21 SSC items that had significant discriminative power. Subsequently, the derived discriminant equation achieved 93% accuracy in correctly classifying a hold-out sample of 29 subjects (14 stutterers and 15 nonstutterers). These results strongly suggest that the 21 items of the SSC identified by discriminant analysis may provide an effective screening device for identifying disfluent speakers who experience an abnormal amount of speech-related anxiety.