Here is the abstract from Emma Higgins’ final year research project, supervised by Dr Cristina McKean and Dr Carolyn Letts.

Listen, we have something to say: Developing methods for eliciting, analysing and understanding children’s stories about themselves

This study aimed to evaluate methods of eliciting and analysing typically developing children’s personal narratives to inform the development of a method for assessing the personal narratives of children with developmental language disorder (DLD).  To do this, it evaluated, using ten-year-old children, the elicitation method for children’s personal narratives designed by the IALP Child Language Committee.  It also evaluated two methods for analysing children’s personal narratives, a structural focused analysis method and a coherence focused analysis method, in relation to children with DLD.  It found the elicitation method enabled children of a range of abilities to tell a range of personal narratives.  It also found, with development of both approaches, a combination of the two analysis methods has potential to provide a reliable and sensitive analysis method providing useful information for the diagnosis of and intervention planning in DLD.

Key words: Developmental Language Disorders, Qualitative Data analysis, Quantitative Data analysis