Program of graduate studies in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology of Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Sao Paulo, Brazil: analysis of four decades of production

Abstract

The Program of Graduate Studies (PEPG) in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology of the Pontifícia Universidade Católoca de São Paulo (PUC-SP) celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2013. The projects developed in that program follow one of five lines of research: Child Hearing, Voice Evaluation and Intervention, Language and Subjectivity, Body and Psyche, and Diagnostic Procedures and PsychoSocial Implications of Hearing Disorders. Objective: to analyze the theses and dissertations defended in the PEPG of PUC-SP according to their research topics and methods. Method: the secondary data were collected on the PEPG’s website and included 739 abstracts of theses and dissertations defended between the years of 1978 and 2012. These were categorized according to: year, author, supervisor and abstract, followed by a classification by research area (Voice, Hearing, Language, Orofacial Myology, Public Health and Clinical Methods) and research method (evaluation/diagnosis/observation, intervention and literature review). The descriptive analysis took into consideration both absolute and relative frequencies, and, subsequently, central tendency and dispersion measures were taken. Results: there was a significant increase in production over the years, especially in the years 2000 and 2001. The most researched areas were Hearing (39.4% )and Language (19.2%), and the most adopted research methods were evaluation/ diagnosis/observation (50.5%) and intervention (22,3%). Conclusion: when analyzing the production of theses and dissertations over the 40 years of the Program of Graduate Studies in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology of PUC-SP, the 739 studies showed a growing trend across all the methods (evaluation/diagnosis/observation, intervention and literature review), predominantly in the Hearing area, followed by Language.