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1 – 10 of 144Poh Chua Siah, Chee Seng Tan, Wan Ying Lee and Mah Ngee Lee
This study examines the hearing students' attitudes and behaviors towards deaf students in Malaysia using the intergroup contact approach.
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the hearing students' attitudes and behaviors towards deaf students in Malaysia using the intergroup contact approach.
Design/methodology/approach
Purposive sampling was used to recruit 439 hearing students at secondary schools. Hearing students were asked to fill in questionnaires that contained four measurements: contact with deaf people, sources of knowledge about deaf people, attitudes towards deaf people and behaviors toward deaf people. A serial mediation model was proposed to investigate the hypothetical mediating role of knowledge and attitudes toward deaf students in the relationship.
Findings
The results of this study showed that contact frequency is negatively associated with attitudes towards deaf people. However, such a relationship is suppressed, only when knowledge is included as a mediator. In addition, mediation analysis supports that sources of knowledge and attitudes about deaf people mediate the relationship between contact and behaviors toward deaf people. Moreover, the frequency of contact indirectly contributes to behaviors through knowledge and attitudes.
Originality/value
The findings indicate that increasing the contact between hearing and deaf students would improve hearing students' attitudes and behaviors towards deaf students. However, this is only when the contact can improve hearing students' knowledge about deaf people and deafness.
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To understand how parents make the decision to implant their deaf young children with cochlear implants, focusing specifically on the concepts of normality, medicalization, and…
Abstract
Purpose
To understand how parents make the decision to implant their deaf young children with cochlear implants, focusing specifically on the concepts of normality, medicalization, and stigma.
Methodology/Approach
I conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with the hearing parents or parent of children with cochlear implants. In all but two families I interviewed the primary caretaker which in all cases was a mother. In the remaining two interviews, I interviewed both parents together. Because of the relative scarcity of families with children with cochlear implants, and the difficulty in connecting with these families, I used a convenience sample, and I did not stratify it in any way. The only requirement for parents to be interviewed is that they had at least one deaf child who had been implanted with at least one cochlear implant. Although this is a small sample, the findings are transferable to other families with the same sociodemographic characteristics as those in my study.
Findings
Parents in the study focused on three key concepts: normality, risk analysis, and being a good parent. Dispositional factors such as the need to be “normal” and the desire for material success for one's children appeared to moderate the cost-benefit calculus.
Research Limitations/Implications
Limitations
This interview project concentrated on hearing families who had implanted their deaf children with cochlear implants; it does not include culturally Deaf parents who choose to use American Sign Language (ASL) with their Deaf children. Understanding how Deaf families understand the concepts of normality, medicalization, and stigma would shed light on how a distinctly “abnormal” group (by a statistical conception of normal) – ASL-using Deaf people-explain normality in the face of using a non-typical communication method. One can learn a lot by studying the absence of a phenomena, in this case, not implanting children with cochlear implants. It is possible that the existential threat felt by some Deaf people, specifically the demographic problem presented by cochlear implants, led Deaf educators or parents to resist being the subject of research.
Overwhelmingly the sample was female, and white. Only two participants were male, and none of the participants were non-white. The lack of diversity in the sample does not necessarily reflect a lack of diversity of children receiving cochlear implants. Medicaid, which disproportionately covers families of color, covers cochlear implants in most cases, so low SES/racial intersectionality should not have affected the lack of diversity in the sample. However, the oral schools are all private pay, with few scholarships available, so low SES/racial intersectionality in the sampling universe (all children who attend oral schools), may have played a part in the lack of racial diversity within the sample.
Implications
Parents in this study were very specific about the fact that they believed cochlear implants would lead to academic, professional, and personal success. They weaved narratives of normality, medicalization, and stigma through their stories. Normality is an important lens from which to see stories about disability and ability, as well as medical correction. As medical science continues to advance, more and more conditions will become medicalized, leading to more and more people taking advanced medical treatments to address problems that were previously considered “problems with living” that are now considered “medical problems” that can be treated with advanced science.
Originality/Value of Paper
This chapter's contribution to the sociological cochlear implant literature is it's weaving of narratives about normality, stigma, and medicalization into parental stories about the cochlear implant decision-making process. Most literature about the cochlear implant decision-making process focus on cost-benefit analysis, and logical decision-making processes, whereas this paper focuses on decision-making factors stemming from bias, emotions, and values.
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Aile Trumm, Edward Jun Shing Lau, Shirley Farthing and Kieran Breen
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the lives of the deaf community, and the implementation of restrictions on face-to-face meetings resulted in the trial introduction…
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the lives of the deaf community, and the implementation of restrictions on face-to-face meetings resulted in the trial introduction of video remote interpreting (VRI) in a secure psychiatric setting. This study aims to use a qualitative research paradigm to explore user experiences to inform potential future technological developments in this area.
Design/methodology/approach
Twelve deaf patients and three interpreters took part in structured face-to-face interviews and discussed their experiences of the use of VRI, with the results being assessed using thematic analysis.
Findings
Seven main themes were identified: resource availability, ease of use, technical issues, misunderstandings, medium secure-specific issues, preferences and human factors. All participants agreed that they did not like the VRI technology in the health-care environment in its current format, and their main concern was the difficulty in understanding the information being communicated. It was considered that this had the potential to incur potentially serious medico-legal and safety implications for both staff and patients alike.
Practical implications
This study has provided detailed users’ feedback about the potential future use in this communication tool and can help guide service developers to review the technology design to tailor it towards the users’ needs. While the existing technology is not currently suitable for this deaf population, particularly because of the potential for error, there is potential scope for further research in this area.
Originality/value
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore the potential use of VRI for a deaf patient population within a secure psychiatric setting, where such technology is unlikely to have otherwise been used.
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Chiara Tagliaro, Alessandra Migliore, Erica Isa Mosca and Stefano Capolongo
This paper aims to explore how the scientific literature and company reports have addressed inclusive workplace design and strategies to date.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how the scientific literature and company reports have addressed inclusive workplace design and strategies to date.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts a scoping review to answer the following question: To what extent is inclusion present in workplace design and related strategies? An analysis of 27 scientific papers and 25 corporate social responsibility reports of the highest-ranked companies in the Great Place to Work global ranking disentangles the main aspects related to workplace design and strategies for promoting inclusion.
Findings
This paper opens avenues for four macro-categories of diversity (psycho-physical aspects; cultural aspects; socio-economic conditions; and ability, experience and strengths) to support the development of inclusive workplace design and strategy. Besides, multiple spatial scales emerged as material and immaterial elements of the workplace encountering inclusion and diversity.
Originality/value
Nowadays, the workforce is becoming more diverse. Although diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has become key to many organizations, it remains unclear how DE&I principles are applied in workspace design and strategies. This scoping review provides a novel perspective on the topic by integrating scientific knowledge and practice-based approaches which still address this matter independently.
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Emma Ferguson-Coleman and Alys Young
Deaf people, who are British Sign Language (BSL) users, are, at times, carers for their parent or spouse when they have dementia. This can be a challenging role for the wider…
Abstract
Purpose
Deaf people, who are British Sign Language (BSL) users, are, at times, carers for their parent or spouse when they have dementia. This can be a challenging role for the wider population, but if the common language in service provision is not one you share, then this care can be impacted by the lack of formal structures that support the Deaf caring role. This study aims to explore the experiences of Deaf carers supporting people with dementia, in an unpaid role, during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand more about their potential support preferences.
Design/methodology/approach
Online interviews with seven Deaf carers sharing their experiences of supporting their family member with dementia happened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to qualitatively examine each Deaf carers’ stories.
Findings
Findings included Deaf carers’ lack of access to information, surrendering their autonomy to hearing family members to communicate with health-care professionals, with overarching isolation within local communities and online. Findings show a widespread infrastructural failure to meet the linguistic and specific support needs of this minority population.
Research limitations/implications
Seven Deaf carers took part in this study. This means the findings may not be generalisable.
Practical implications
Health-care professionals and social care structures need to develop robust clear communication pathways for Deaf carers to receive the support needed to provide effective care.
Social implications
If health-care professionals undertake training about Deaf people and BSL, that will mean Deaf carers will receive effective support to be able to care for a person living with dementia. This means that their Deaf identity will be recognised within the mainstream and the care provided will be much more effective for the person with dementia.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, these are the first interviews undertaken with Deaf carers of people with dementia during the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns. Understanding everyday barriers and social care limitations in terms of language access will enable Deaf carers to assert their rights and for care professionals to adapt their communication to match the individuals involved in the care package.
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Marlina Marlina, Arisul Mahdi and Yeni Karneli
Social anxiety disorder is a common phenomenon that occurs in everyone with varying degrees, ranging from mild to severe. One of the causes of social anxiety disorder is a…
Abstract
Purpose
Social anxiety disorder is a common phenomenon that occurs in everyone with varying degrees, ranging from mild to severe. One of the causes of social anxiety disorder is a traumatic experience due to sexual harassment that has been experienced. In deaf women, this experience is made more difficult because of the language and speech limitations shared. As a result, irrational thoughts and beliefs arise for the victim. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of the Bisindo-based rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) model in reducing social anxiety in deaf women who are victims of sexual harassment.
Design/methodology/approach
The research method uses single-subject research with multiple baselines across subjects. The research subjects were deaf women victims of sexual harassment who the National Government Organization Woman Crises Center in West Sumatra and the Association of Indonesian Special Education Professionals identified. Data were collected by observation and social anxiety scale and analyzed by graphical visual analysis.
Findings
The results showed that the Bisindo-based REBT was effective in reducing social anxiety in deaf women who were victims of sexual harassment.
Research limitations/implications
The implementation of therapy in this study involved therapists, teachers and sign language interpreters. It requires extraordinary time and effort for the subjects to be able to reveal the sexual harassment they experienced. Furthermore, the small number of subjects meant that the results of this study could not be generalized widely. Therefore, this study has implications for future researchers to conduct experiments using the Bisindo-based REBT model on more subjects.
Practical implications
Practically, the results of this study have implications for a model for handling cases of sexual harassment in deaf women that can be used by women’s organizations and the Indonesian Association of Women with Disabilities.
Originality/value
It is recommended for counselors, psychologists and therapists to use the Bisindo-based REBT in dealing with cases of sexual harassment in deaf women because therapy that follows the characteristics of the victim’s language can help them to get the expected results.
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Aaron Payne, Helen Proctor and Ilektra Spandagou
This article examines the educational decision-making of hearing parents for their deaf children born during a period (1970–1990s) before the introduction of new-born hearing…
Abstract
Purpose
This article examines the educational decision-making of hearing parents for their deaf children born during a period (1970–1990s) before the introduction of new-born hearing screening in New South Wales, where the study was conducted, and prior to the now near-universal adoption of cochlear implants in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach
We present findings from an oral history study in which parents were invited to recall how they planned for the education of their deaf children.
Findings
We propose that these oral histories shed light on how the concept, early intervention – a child development principle that became axiomatic from about the 1960s – significantly shaped the conduct of parents of deaf children, constituting both hope and burden, and intensifying a focus on early decision-making. They also illustrate ways in which parenting was shaped by two key structural shifts, one, being the increasing enrolment of deaf children in mainstream rather than separate classrooms and the other being the transformation of deafness itself by developments in hearing assistance technology.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to a sociological/historical literature of “parenting for education” that almost entirely lacks deaf perspectives and a specialist literature of parental decision-making for deaf children that is almost entirely focussed on the post cochlear implant generation. The paper is distinctive in its treatment of the concept of “early intervention” as a historical phenomenon rather than a “common sense” truth, and proposes that parents of deaf children were at the leading edge of late-20th and early-21st century parenting intensification.
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Kinjal Bhargavkumar Mistree, Devendra Thakor and Brijesh Bhatt
According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper…
Abstract
Purpose
According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.
Design/methodology/approach
This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.
Findings
As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.
Research limitations/implications
It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.
Originality/value
Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.
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Witness Roya and Sandiso Ngcobo
Several studies have been conducted on social inequalities. Despite highlighting inequalities between the rich and poor, researchers often overlook the fact that disabled people…
Abstract
Several studies have been conducted on social inequalities. Despite highlighting inequalities between the rich and poor, researchers often overlook the fact that disabled people in Africa are marginalised more than their counterparts elsewhere. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theory and data analysis method, this study sought to answer two questions: (1) What is reported about the inclusion of disabled people in using digital media? (2) How is it reported? Twenty-two articles were purposively sampled: 15 from Newsday and 7 from The Herald published between 20 November 2017 and 24 September 2022. Findings indicate that the two papers exposed marginalisation of disabled people in an educative and informative way and had erudite analysis from disabled columnists. This was successful because the papers relied on the disabled community as sources of information and contributors of published material. The papers also engaged stakeholders such as corporates, government and civil society organisations. It is recommended that other newspapers and many forms of mass communication provide a representation of people with different forms of disabilities. Future studies could seek the views of disabled communities about their presentation in the digital media through disabled writers and providers of information.
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Mona Nikidehaghani and Sanja Pupovac
This paper aims to investigate how embedding accounting techniques of cost and budgeting within the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) potentially perpetuates…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate how embedding accounting techniques of cost and budgeting within the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) potentially perpetuates colonial practices for Australian First Nations people living in remote areas. Further, the paper aims to explore how accounting might help to integrate the unique modes of accountability First Nations people have over disability care into the NDIS funding system. Ultimately, the aim is to discern whether accounting practices can be mobilised as a means to decolonising the NDIS framework.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a qualitative methodology to analyse public hearings from the Australian Disability Royal Commission. Drawing on Bhabha's (1994) concept of the “third space”, this study investigates how accounting techniques can be used to potentially decolonise the NDIS. This study also borrows Bhabha's (1994) concept of the third space to explore the potential for decolonising the NDIS through accounting techniques.
Findings
Findings show that the accounting techniques pertaining to funding and costs embedded within the NDIS contribute to displacing and disconnecting First Nations people from their cultural practices and ways of life. Further, the analysis reveals that the NDIS funding system could help to decolonise the NDIS space if it were modified to incorporate First Nations' perspectives on accountability for disability care.
Originality/value
The case of the NDIS exposes glimpses of colonisation in contemporary Australia, where Western institutional and economic systems dominate over the structure and authority of the practice. In this paper, this study demonstrates that the accounting system used by the NDIS plays a role in marginalising First Nations people. However, accounting, as a technology of negotiation, could also be mobilised to enhance accountability for disability care outcomes and pave the way for decolonising public policies.
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