The Relationship of Self-Efficacy and Depression to Stuttering

This study investigated the relationship of self-efficacy for verbal fluency, academic self-efficacy, and depression between adolescents who stutter and fluent speakers. Two separate discriminant function analyses were performed. The first analysis used the self-efficacy and depression scores as response variables and fluency classification as the grouping variable. Results indicated that self-efficacy for speech was the sole significant variable and accounted for 61% of the variance in group status. A second simplified discriminant function analysis was performed using speech self-efficacy as the sole predictor of group membership. This single discriminant function correctly classified 81% of the overall sample into their known groups. Further, classification for participants who did not stutter (95.2%) was better than for those who did stutter (67%). Based on this and earlier research, adolescents appear to be capable of using self-efficacy scaling as a measure of confidence for verbal fluency, which may eventually prove to be useful in treatment.