Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

1-1-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Ying Hao

Second Advisor

Hyejin Park

Third Advisor

Gregory Snyder

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

Telepractice is a growing method in providing services in the profession of Speech-Language Pathology. One question with this growing method is, how do we build rapport when using telepractice? In this study, we intended to find what pediatric SLPs' perceptions and strategies of building rapport via telepractice is with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) ages 5-12, and children’s age was considered as an influential factor. While previous studies have focused on perceptions, we wanted to know what SLPs are doing in order to build rapport with their clients when using telepractice. We reached out to 223 SLPs and there were 17 participants who completed the survey. All 17 responders were invited for a semi-structured interview, and three of them completed the interview. A quantitative analysis (i.e., paired samples t-tests) was implemented to compare SLPs’ rating of perceptions, strategy usage and clinical outcomes for the two age groups of 5-8 and 9-12 of children with ASD on the survey questions. A qualitative analysis was conducted for the responses by those who participated in the semistructured interview. The results showed that SLPs are able to adequately build rapport when using telepractice, what the methods to build rapport are, and what the pros and cons of building rapport via telepractice are. We found that there is an overall good perception from SLPs of rapport building via telepratice with this population in both ages 5-8 and 9-12. We also found that strategies are similar in telepractice with this population in both ages 5-8 and 9-12. We foumd a significant finding that SLPs find rapport building with the younger group (5-8) to be more similar in face-to-face therapy and telepractice than the older group (9-12).

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