Criticism
The results of the study were freely available in the library of the University of Iowa, but Johnson did not seek publication of the results. The experiment became national news in the wake of a series of articles conducted by an investigative reporter at the San Jose Mercury News in 2001, and a book was written to provide an impartial scientific evaluation. The panel of authors in the book consists mostly of speech pathologists who fail to reach any consensus on either the ethical ramifications or scientific consequences of the Monster Study. Richard Schwartz concludes in Chapter 6 of the book that the Monster Study "was unfortunate in Tudor and Johnson's lack of regard for the potential harm to the children who participated and in their selection of institutionalized children simply because they were easily available. The deception and the apparent lack of debriefing were also not justifiable." Other authors concur claiming the orphan experiment was not within the ethical boundaries of acceptable research. Others, however, felt that the ethical standards in 1939 were different from those used today. Some felt the study was poorly designed and executed by Tudor, and as a result the data offered no proof of Johnson's subsequent hypothesis that "stuttering begins, not in the child's mouth but in the parent's ear" -- i.e., that it is the well-meaning parent's effort to help the child avoid what the parent has labeled "stuttering" (but is in fact within the range of normal speech) that contributes to what ultimately becomes the problem diagnosed as stuttering.
Read more about this topic: The Monster Study
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)