Research Collaboration between Clinical Psychology Vis-À-Vis Speech, Language and Hearing in India

Abstract

This study explores the nature or extent of research collaboration between clinical psychology vis-à-vis speech, language and hearing in India. It covers a purposive sample of 90 from 710 published research articles on identified topics of psychosocial issues that appeared in all previous volumes for equal number of years of an indexed national journal. A collaboration index based on frequency, trend or pattern of authorships for research contributions within the identified timelines and aqualitative perusal of common research concerns between the two disciplines was also undertaken. Results show that two-thirds of surveyed research papers are published by single authors (67.77%) leaving <1% of the publications by 3-4 authors. While the frequency of 1 paper by 1 author is high with low collaborative indices (CI: 0.322), a perusal of mutual research concerns show that the most frequently studied topics are stuttering, prevalence data for communication disorders, test development, revalidation and norm revision. The merits, demerits and common barriers in inter-disciplinary collaboration is discussed before concluding on the need for evolving a problem focused multi-authorship agenda for research in the near future.