Good hearing is of key importance when it comes to the speech and language development of a child. Such development is related to and can therefore influence other development fields, such as an individual's social, cognitive, and personal development. Nowadays, early hearing screenings are essential to identifying the status of hearing ability in infants, while modern technology and early intervention significantly influence the speech and language development of a deaf child. One of the hearing aids is a cochlear implant which helps deaf children sense sound. Children and adolescents with cochlear implant are increasingly often integrated into adapted school programmes with additional professional assistance where they are included among hearing peers. Cochlear implant allows the children to reach age-appropriate milestones in their speech and language communication which improves their quality of life.
For the empirical part of the thesis, we used a questionnaire, designed specifically for purposes of our research, to establish how deaf children and adolescents, who have cochlear implant and are included in adapted school programmes with additional professional assistance, evaluate their quality of life in comparison to their hearing peers. The questionnaire consists of five areas that greatly influence the quality of life during childhood and adolescence: physical well-being, general well-being and self-image, family, friendship, and school. In the sample, we included forty-six children and adolescents aged eight to fifteen. Twenty-three of these are deaf children and adolescents with cochlear implant who attend an adapted school programme with additional professional assistance, while the other twenty-three children and adolescents experienced typical development and have no hearing difficulties. Through our research, we concluded that deaf children and adolescents with cochlear implant evaluate their general quality of life similar to their hearing peers. Their evaluation of physical well-being and family is slightly worse than that of their hearing peers; however, they evaluated the areas of friendship and school better than their hearing peers did. Despite marginally different results in certain areas, we did not find any statistically important differences in the evaluation of individual areas nor in evaluating the general quality of life between the two groups.
|
