Clinician reliability in rating voice improvement after laryngeal nerve section for spastic dysphonia

A recent study by Aronson and DeSanto (1983) showed that, although section of the recurrent laryngeal nerve to relieve adductor spastic dysphonia effected considerable improvement in nearly 100% of the voices immediately after surgery, within the next 3 years 64% had returned to their preoperative status or worse. These findings were based on ratings by one speech pathologist, and the study was not designed to measure the reliability of the rater’s judgments. The experiment reported here was designed to repeat the Aronson and DeSanto study, with three raters instead of one and under more experimentally controlled conditions. Results show high intrajudge and intcrjudge reliability within and between the two studies. It is concluded that Aronson and DeSanto’s original findings were reliable.