ABSTRACT
Jack S. Damico has a distinguished career aimed at improving the lives of and services for people with communication disorders. In large part, he has accomplished this by asking questions about the services offered to our clients: What happens in therapy for aphasia? How do clinicians promote literacy? How do speech-language pathologists assess students from diverse cultures? Indeed, his interests have been varied: second language acquisition, diversity and multiculturalism, language disabilities in children, literacy, classroom interaction, and therapy for adults with aphasia. However, a thread that is woven through his work is the need to question, to explore, and to expose, rather than blithely accept the status quo. In this process Jack (and his many students) learned that qualitative research traditions fulfill this need to go beyond hypothesis testing and into the domain of discovery—to ask what’s going on? with the expressed intent of reinforcing or improving our clinical goings on. As his student, friend, and colleague, I have been honored to join Jack on his journey to explore aspects of our field using various qualitative research methods.
