The development of life satisfaction and current subjective wellbeing between childhood and adolescence in subjects with hearing impairments

How do people with impaired hearing feel about everyday life? Similar to those who can hear? Are they just as stressed or just as relaxed in the same situations?

Communication without barriers, and with it participation, is crucial to the quality of life of people with impaired hearing. Constraints on participation diminish life satisfaction and hence mental health (depending on biopsychosocial model, ICF, see Deutsches Institut für Medizinische Dokumentation und Information DIMDI, 2005). Because of the consequences for communicative, cognitive and socio-emotional development (Hintermair & Marschark, 2008), hearing impairment is a risk factor for participation.

There is currently growing interest in findings about the subjective life satisfaction of people with impaired hearing who have attended integrated schools (Hintermair, 2010). The aim is to examine whether integration provides the desirable conditions for generating subjective wellbeing. Studies pay little attention, however, to the situational conditions that influence everyday life (obstacles to communication such as ambient noise, too many partners interacting, or a lack of technical aids). Studies to date have tended to show that social and communication problems become more evident as children grow up (in youth and adolescence) (Lönne, 2009; Brunnberg et al., 2008), but without establishing how this correlates with everyday conditions. Moreover, there is currently a lack of data on adolescents and longitudinal studies.

The present project is a sequel to the study on the subjective wellbeing of hearing-impaired children and teenagers in integrated schools and lays the foundations for the world’s first longitudinal study on the psychosocial development of the hearing-impaired to factor in everyday conditions.