CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study. Identifying language impairments in children
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Cognitive Disorders, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- Language impairment, classification, Delphi, SLI, identification, consensus, Classification, Identification
- Copyright
- © 2016 Bishop et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study. Identifying language impairments in children. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1986v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1986v1
Abstract
Delayed or impaired language development is a common developmental concern, yet there is little agreement about the criteria used to identify and classify language impairments in children. Children's language difficulties are at the interface between education, medicine and the allied professions, who may all adopt different approaches to conceptualising them. Our goal in this study was to use an online Delphi technique to see whether it was possible to achieve consensus among professionals on appropriate criteria for identifying children who might benefit from specialist services. We recruited a panel of 59 experts representing ten disciplines (including education, psychology, speech-language therapy/pathology, paediatrics and child psychiatry) from English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and USA). The starting point for round 1 was a set of 46 statements based on articles and commentaries in a special issue of a journal focusing on this topic. Panel members rated each statement for both relevance and validity on a seven-point scale, and added free text comments. These responses were synthesised by the first two authors, who then removed, combined or modified items with a view to improving consensus. The resulting set of statements was returned to the panel for a second evaluation (round 2). Consensus (percentage reporting 'agree' or 'strongly agree') was at least 80 per cent for 24 of 27 round 2 statements, though many respondents qualified their response with written comments. These were again synthesised by the first two authors. The resulting consensus statement is reported here, with additional summary of relevant evidence, and a concluding commentary on residual disagreements and gaps in the evidence base.
Author Comment
This is a pre-print version of an article that is under review at PLOS One. In it, we describe a Delphi process designed to reach consensus on criteria for identifying children with significant language impairments.