Some clarifications about message passing research for FC and its variants
In a comment on the Janyce’s Clever Han(d)s Skepticism and “Ido in Autismland”, I wrote:
Any experienced facilitators who are interested in exploring the possibility of ideomotor effects during facilitation will find researchers eager to work with them. Unfortunately, facilitators since the early 1990s have been instructed “don’t test,” and nearly all are compliant with that maxim.
Could it be that the facilitators and parents of facilitated individuals are no longer interested in/curious about exploring the ideomotor effects in FC?
Of course, I’m not saying that there are no facilitators/parents who consider themselves to be interested in exploring the ideomotor effects in FC. Indeed, there are such people out there, though in some cases they have alienated potential research partners so much that those particular researchers have no interest in having anything to do with them. Nonetheless, if such a parent/facilitator really wants to, they can certainly find other research partners whom they haven’t alienated.
As for my interest in such research, I’m game–provided that:
The facilitator/parent agrees to participate in rigorous message-passing and double-blind testing, i.e., testing in which the individuals being subjected to FC are asked a large set of questions (a) that the facilitator has not seen ahead of time, (b) to which the facilitator cannot possibly know the answers, and (c) to which the FCed individual is unable to produce answers without FC.
The facilitator/parent is willing to provide (or allow me to conduct) a (recent) detailed linguistic and literacy assessment of the FCed child without their facilitator present in order to provide a basis for meeting condition (c).
The facilitator/parent lives in the greater Philadelphia area or in some place easily accessible from Philadelphia (say New York City or Washington DC)
In fact, I have offered to do precisely this sort of testing with a couple of families local to me whose children use a variant of FC known as RPM/S2C. But, alas, no takers.
For reasons that should be obvious, an assessment of FC that doesn’t ensure that conditions 1-2 are unequivocally met is an unreliable assessment.
As for condition 3, I would be happy to help people who are interested in testing that involves conditions 1-2 and who live outside the geographic area I’ve specified find someone local to them who can arrange for such testing.
I should add that, for me personally, there is one final condition:
4. Paranormal phenomena like ESP and spiritualism are not part of what we are exploring.
