From Eileen K. Crowe
ASHA Director, State Association Relations
ecrowe @ asha.org

"ASHA Partners with Prevention Magazine"
Will be Featured in January 5th, 2005 Issue

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) is partnering with Prevention magazine to raise awareness about communication disorders to their 2.4 million readers. As part of this partnership, the January 5th, 2005 issue of Prevention magazine will feature a one-page piece on consumer perceptions and perspectives about speech, language, and hearing disorders. This issue of Prevention magazine will be on newsstands starting December 5th, 2004.

This partnership is part of a three-prong approach between ASHA and Prevention which also includes an online quiz and national telephone research survey. As part of this partnership, which began this Fall, Prevention has run an online quiz on their web site which has a direct link to a specially-designed ASHA web page, www.asha.org/prevention, developed specifically for this project. Quiz takers going to the ASHA site have been able to link to various web pages to learn about various speech, language, and hearing disorders and how to locate an audiologist or speech-language pathologist in their area.

The other facet of this partnership includes Prevention Magazine conducting a telephone survey to 1,000 readers. The survey inquires into the readers’ specific knowledge about speech, language, and hearing disorders, how they seek help for a disorders, and from whom they receive help.

From the research obtained from the Prevention Magazine telephone survey and a separate concurrent survey being conducted with more than 1,000 consumers nationwide, ASHA will be analyzing and evaluating the combined research results to build future education and awareness campaigns, set the direction for media relations activities, and create Public Service Advertising (PSA) campaigns for the Association.