The KiddyCAT: A Test-Retest Reliability Investigation

Abstract

Research with the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children who Stutter (KiddyCAT) in the United States, Italy and Poland has shown that, as a group, preschool and kindergarten children who stutter report, as of the age of three, already significantly more in the way of a negative attitude toward speech compared to their nonstuttering peers. In addition to its discriminative usefulness, the test’s validity has been established. What still needed to be determined was the KiddyCAT’s test-retest reliability, which was the aim of this investigation. In order to do so, a Dutch form of the KiddyCAT was administered to a sample of 34 stuttering and 42 nonstuttering children between the age of three and six on two separate occasions. After the initial testing, the children were retested a week to 12 days later. For both groups of participants, the scores of the first and second test administration correlated significantly, and the average scores did not differ from each other to a statistically significant extent. Thus, the repeated administration of the test revealed that the obtained first and second test scores were highly dependent and predictable from each other, and stable over time. As a side issue, it was, once again, confirmed that the scores of the children who do and do not stutter differed to a statistically significant extent.