Does Vermont DAIL’s FC Website Rely Exclusively on Pro-FC Organizations for Guidance?
This is the fourth in a series about Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living’s (DAIL) commitment to Facilitated Communication (FC), a discredited technique actively promoted on the government-sponsored website.
Despite a thorough search of the DAIL website, I have yet to come across any information informing readers that FC has no reliable evidence to support it and that most major health, education, and advocacy groups have position statements against its use. With that in mind, I skipped over the Annotated Communication Resource Guide temporarily and moved straight into the Research section.
Vermont DAIL’s FC website appears to rely on pro-FC websites that fail to include evidence-based research in their reference lists.
The Research section consists of three main headings: United for Communication Choice (UCC), Institute on Communication and Inclusion (ICI), and Pointing Forward: Exploring the Research on Typing to Communicate – Webinar. The first couple links are for two of the top pro-FC organizations in the United States. The webinar link didn’t work when I tried it, but I will check again at some future point.
For today’s blog post, I will focus on UCC.
United for Communication Choice is a pro-FC organization devoted to “defending basic human rights” (e.g., the right to continue using a discredited technique?) and soliciting donations for the cause. How do I know this? Because clicking the link on the DAIL website takes readers to the donate page of the organization. The donate button isn’t technically on the DAIL site, but could very easily give the appearance of solicitation. Anyone know if this activity is allowed on government sponsored sites?
UCC’s main purpose seems to be to rally against the American Speech-Language Hearing Association’s (ASHA) statement opposing FC. For those unfamiliar with ASHA, the organization renewed their opposition statement of FC in 2018 after (yet another) systematic review revealed no evidence-based research to support proponent claims of independent communication. The original position statement had been in place since 1995. ASHA strengthened the language against FC when they wrote the updated version, citing lack of evidence, concerns of facilitator influence, and documented harms, such as false allegations of abuse.
In addition, ASHA added a position statement opposing Rapid Prompting Method, a variant which proponents claim is unrelated to FC. However, a systematic review revealed no evidence that supported proponent claims of independent communication. Rather, RPM shares characteristics with FC in terms of facilitator cuing and prompt dependency and, therefore, warranted a position in opposition to its use.
UCC claims ASHA’s statements are unethical, but mostly because a key piece of information is left off the site. The UCC seems focused on one, apparently retracted, study. But, ASHA’s position statements, based on a systematic review and member comments, are in alignment with those adopted by the following organizations. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I list them here because they are not on the DAIL website.
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, American Psychological Association, Association for Behavior Analysis International, Association for Science in Autism Treatment, Behavior Analysis Association of Michigan, Canadian Paediatric Society, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (Syracuse University), Heilpädagogische Forschung, International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Irish Association of Speech & Language Therapists, National Autism Society (UK), New York State Health Department, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, New Zealand Ministries of Health and Education, Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis, Inc., Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network, Speech-Language & Audiology Canada, Speech Pathology Australia, Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability, Inc.
More about these statements is available here.
A subheading under the UCC on the DAIL website is “Compilation of Peer-Reviewed Research.” Interesting list. We downloaded the pdf and found that the relevant articles fell within three main categories: anecdotes (reports with no evidence-based measures to back up claims), flawed studies (studies that attempted to prove authorship, but failed to uphold rigorous standards), and interesting but not proof (articles that contained no information regarding FC). We have added the articles with annotations on our website (see Critiques of Pro-FC Articles and Interesting, but Not Proof).
Of the ten articles featured on the main compilation page of the UCC website, eight fell in the “interesting but not proof” category and did not mention FC.
The first of the remaining articles, Cardinal and Falvey (2014), is an opinion paper, not an evidence-based authorship study. The article is one of four received when TASH: DisabilityAdvocacy Organization put out a call for papers to discuss the issue of FC (see Agran, 2014). And, of the four, it is the only one in favor of the technique. UCC’s compilation, and subsequently, the DAIL’s website does not include these companion articles:
Mostert, M. P. (2014). An activist approach to debunking FC. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 36. DOI: 10.1177/1540796914556779
Singer, G.H.S., Horner, R.H., Dunlap, G., and Wang, M. (2014). Standards of proof: TASH, facilitated communication, and the science-based practices movement. Research and Practices for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 39 (3), 178-188. DOI: 10.1177/1540796914558831
Travers, J., et al. (2015, January 7). Facilitated communication denies people with disabilities their voice. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 39 (3), 195-202. DOI: 10.1177/1540796914556778
The second of the remaining articles, Tuzzi (2009), is also not an evidence-based authorship study. Instead, it focuses on analyzing the written output of facilitated messages and falls into a category of “authorship” articles that seem to claim that FC works because messages typed using FC say it works. Timo Saloviita discussed this issue in an article called “Does Linguistic Analysis Confirm the Validity of Facilitated Communication?” He argues no, saying,
“When young people with autism write independently, their texts do not contain the idiosyncracies reported in FC studies. If anything, the texts are defined by the lack of those ‘creative’ features so uniformly reported in FC.” Timo Saloviita (2018).
The remaining subheading on the DAIL website for UCC is “Quick Facts about Communication Choice.” This document probably needs its own blog post, so I will save it for next time.
For more information about Vermont’s Commitment to FC, check out the following blog posts:
For questions about informed consent: