School-age hearing siblings' perceptions of parental competency in deaf-parented families

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the perceptions of parental competency between interpreting school-age hearing siblings and non-interpreting school-age hearing siblings in Deaf-parented families. This study represents a secondary analysis of data obtained in a study titled "Family Functioning: Deaf Parents with Nondeaf Children" (Jones, 1990). In order to fully understand families in which Deaf parents raise hearing children, multiple perspectives were examined. Chapter I discusses hearing impairment from a Functional/Audiological perspective followed by a discussion of hearing impairment from a Socio-Cultural perspective. This approach corresponds to a recent emphasis on a cultural, rather than a pathological, view of Deafness. In this study, the lowercase "deaf" was used to refer to the audiological condition of hearing impairment, and the uppercase "Deaf" referred to a particular group of deaf people who share a language and a culture. (Padden & Humphries, 1988).