Multidimensional scaling analysis of communicative disorders by race and sex in a mid-south public school system.

During the past decade, there was renewed interest in determining the prevalence of communicative disorders. Reasons for this interest were to better understand personnel resources and utilization and cultural differences and dynamics. The purpose of this study was to obtain demographic data on the prevalence of communicative disorder is the Nashville public schools. From administrative sources, 2.88% of the population manifested primary handicaps in the broad categories of speech, language, and hearing. Of the overall percentage, the several disorders accounted for 86.3%, 9.0% and 4.7% of the handicaps. Prevalence figures for race were proportional to their incidence in the population; differences noted were qualitative rather than quantitative. The data further indicated that sex was independent of handicaps, but the incidence of disorders for males was much greater than females and was statistically significant