iHOPE Stuttering Lab
Theoretical Framework
Three frameworks work in concert to anchor every research question in the lab — ensuring that our work attends to the full human experience of stuttering, from body function to spiritual meaning.
The Integrated Lens
Three Frameworks, One Research Identity
The three overlapping circles represent the convergence of the ICF, Person-Centered Care, and the HOPE Framework. No single framework is sufficient on its own. Together, they create a research identity that is structurally rigorous, clinically grounded, and humanly complete.
International Classification of Functioning
The ICF provides the structural scaffold for research across body function, activity, participation, and contextual factors. The lab deliberately moves beyond body-function measurement toward participation and environmental variables — asking not just what stuttering does, but how it shapes a person's life.
The lab's use of the ICF is deliberate: by anchoring research in participation domains, every study design is oriented toward outcomes that matter to people who stutter, not just outcomes that are easy to measure.
Person-Centered Care
Person-centered values ensure that people who stutter define what matters in their own communication lives. The lab does not assume a hierarchy of speaking situations — it asks the participant. Research instruments are co-designed with people who stutter.
This commitment extends to the lab's research design: PWS serve as co-investigators, not merely research subjects. Ecological and cultural validity are built in from inception, not retrofitted after data collection.
HOPE Framework
The HOPE Framework attends to the spiritual meaning, purpose, community belonging, and personal identity that shape how people who stutter experience speaking moments. It fills a documented gap in the stuttering literature.
The HOPE Framework is being operationalized as a clinical research instrument for the first time in stuttering research — moving from a clinical philosophy to a measurable outcome variable in intervention studies.
Deep Dive
The HOPE Framework
Each dimension of the HOPE Framework represents a distinct domain of the stuttering experience that is rarely captured by traditional outcome measures. Together, they form a comprehensive portrait of what it means to live and flourish as a person who stutters.
Hope
The sense of meaning, purpose, and future orientation that a person who stutters carries into speaking situations. Hope shapes whether a person approaches or avoids participation.
Openness
Willingness to engage with one's stuttering experience — including its spiritual and existential dimensions — without avoidance or shame. Openness is both a clinical goal and a research variable.
Participation
Active engagement in communication across life domains — vocational, relational, educational, and spiritual. Participation is the primary outcome variable in the iHOPE Lab's research.
Experience
The lived, subjective reality of stuttering — including its emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and relational dimensions. Experience is the unit of analysis, not the speech behavior itself.
See the Framework in Action
Explore how the HOPE Framework shapes the lab's research questions and clinician training resources.