Resilience and Deaf Children: A Literature Review

Abstract

The theoretical frameworks encompassed by resilience have scarcely been applied to an understanding of the experiences of deaf children and their families, nor to specific interventions in relation to this group. This article critically reviews mainstream (i.e. non-deaf-related) resilience literature to analyse its intersection with the concerns of the deafness field. In particular, it focuses on: the implications of failing to account for the social construction of outcomes-orientated definitions of resilience given the medical, social and cultural definitions of what it is to be deaf; difficulties associated with the perception of deafness as a risk factor; problems that arise through the individualization of resilience in the contexts of deafness and disability; the potential reframing of resilience as navigation through the experience of being deaf in worlds that fail to accommodate and/or actively deny that experience; the extent to which resilience-related psychosocial factors are different or differently achieved in the case of deaf children; and how the analysis of the small corpus of resilience specific work with deaf children and families might reveal the direction of further empirical study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords:

• British Sign Language
• deaf
• resilience