Enhancing sustained interaction between children with congenital deaf-blindness and their educators

Item does not contain fulltextEducators and children with congenital deaf-blindness experience major challenges in building interactions that are reciprocated and sustained. Studies have shown that affect attunement and sensitive responsiveness are crucial for a child to feel recognized and for synchronizing early conversations. The authors previously presented the Diagnostic Intervention Model (DIM) as a guide for designing and implementing interventions to foster harmonious interactions and examined the efficacy of the DIM in the Contact effect study. Considerable effects were found on core interaction categories for both the educators and the children. However, the dyadic category of sustained interaction was not evaluated. In this study, the authors demonstrated the effects of the DIM on sustained interaction within a reciprocal three-turn structure (such as the educator-child-educator or the child-educator-child). They reanalyzed observational data from the Contact effect study and looked at the duration of sustained interaction, the duration of the longest interaction sequence, and the mean number of turns in a sequence. The results are evaluated and discusse