Adaptive Emotional Abilities of Adolescents with Hearing Impairment

The present study was conducted to explore the levels of adaptive emotional abilities of adolescents with hearing impairment as well as to find the roles of socio-demographic variables in the development of their emotional abilities. For this purpose an indigenous instrument, the Adaptive Emotional Abilities Scale was developed based on Emotional Ability Model proposed by Mayer and Salovey (1997). A comparative sample of 1050 hearing adolescents was also recruited. The scale was administered to 469 randomly selected adolescents with hearing impairment and 1050 hearing participants between the age range of 12 and 18 years. The instrument was found to have acceptable level of validity and reliability. Proportion Consensus Method (Barchard & Russel, 2006) was used for scoring. Results showed that hearing participants were significantly higher on Adaptive Emotional Ability Scale than the adolescents with hearing impairment. On the other hand, it was found that socio-demographic variables; such as access to hearing assessment and speech services, time of intervention, presence of hearing impaired family member, preferred language of family, and preferred language of the participants themselves regardless of their hearing loss; play important roles in developing the adaptive emotional abilities of the adolescents with hearing impairment. The results clearly indicated that hearing impairment itself is not the only reason of poor performance of the adolescents with hearing impairment