The Behavior Assessment Battery: An Individualized Approach to Differential Diagnosis and Therapy for Those Who Stutter
By Kathryn Podolsky
Gene J. Brutten, emeritus professor, and Martine Vanryckeghem, associate professor in the University of Central Florida's Department of Communicative Disorders, have co-authored the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB), published in English and Dutch and for both children and adults.  The BAB is a diagnostic "kit" that provides clinicians and therapists with the tools necessary to assess clients' fluency failures and make possible therapy that is specifically tailored to meet the particular needs of each client.
Children and adult forms of inter-related, standardized tests are found in the BAB's attaché case. Also provided in the case are two clinical manuals that highlight the tests' validity and reliability. The BAB data make it clear that no one set of treatment targets or mode of therapy is equally appropriate for all who stutter.
"The BAB is a multi-dimensional and evidence-based approach to diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making," according to Drs. Brutten and Vanryckeghem. "It provides data which make it possible to distinguish between those who stutter, those individuals whose speech dysfluencies are a result of other disorders that disrupt fluency and the speech interruptions and associated behaviors that are normal rather than clinically significant." 
The battery of tests highlights the fact that the mere presence of fluency failures is insufficient to validly define the person who stutters. They include:
- the Speech Situation Checklist for the evaluation of an individual's emotional reaction to and speech disruption in a range of different speech situations
- the Behavior Checklist for the determination of the type and number of devices that a person uses to avoid or escape speech disruption
- the Communication Attitude test, which measures the extent to which one evidences negative beliefs about his or her speech ability
The Behavior Assessment Battery is printed in Belgium by the Association for the Integration of Handicapped People and is conjointly distributed in the Netherlands by Acco Publishers. For more information, please contact Martine Vanryckeghem at martinev@mail.ucf.edu.
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