![]() There are many forms of instrumental measures that may be used to describe the voice signal and underlying vocal function. If clinical experience, expertise, and perceptual judgments form the foundation of diagnostic hypotheses, then instrumental measures are a key factor in the acceptance or rejection of these hypotheses. Instrumental measures can also help guide and support overall clinical judgments and allow for the comparison of vocal performance to appropriate normative data. In addition, the demands of effective health care delivery and reimbursement issues have required the voice clinician to quantify patient characteristics both in diagnosis and through the course of therapy via instrumental measures. 2 Because the environment in which speech–language pathologists practice continually and rapidly evolves, ever greater sophistication from the clinician is demanded in terms of our evaluation methods and procedures, and this includes the expanding use of instrumental procedures. Instrumental measures are typically obtained using electronic or computer-based equipment. These aforementioned issues may be addressed by incorporating instrumental measures into our assessment procedures. Unfortunately, perceptions cannot be compared with measurable norms in any valid manner. 1 In making these diagnostic comparisons, it is common to compare our current patient to the average performance and average deviation of a target sample. In addition, since one of the fundamental decisions made in any diagnostic is one of “normal/typical” versus “abnormal/atypical,” we must recognize that perceptual judgments alone do not allow for objective comparison with normative groups. Auditory-perceptions may also be difficult to characterize and may not be as credible as numerical test procedures. However, we have also stated key limitations with auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice including inter-clinician differences and biases that may result in problems of scale validity and reliability. ![]() In the previous chapter, we have described the initial stages of the voice evaluation process in which the perceptual description of the patient’s voice holds a necessary and essential place as a voice evaluation measure for both the clinician and the patient. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |