2024/08/12 by Kristella Montiegel, Sara A. Goico · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Psychology · #Hearing Impairment and Communication #Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
paper · doi:10.1080/14643154.2024.2389590
openalex publication_date 2024/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The concept of relational autonomy is widely applied in bioethics research to elucidate how patients’ abilities in agentively making medical decisions are constrained within a complex structural system and set of relations; thus, rather than being individualistic in nature, autonomy is relationally and interdependently situated. While this perspective is thought-provoking, it is seldom explored in settings outside of healthcare. An equally critical site of decision-making processes is found in special education, where parents of children with disabilities must contend with information from both teachers and physicians to make choices that best support their child’s learning and development. Families of deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) children in particular are uniquely positioned to encounter decisions that intersect educational, medical, and sociocultural levels – that is, in the earliest years of a D/HH child’s life, parents must make decisions about the child’s medical care and whether they will receive hearing technology or treatments, which in turn shapes the inherently cultural decision of linguistic choice, which in turn shapes educational decisions about the type of schooling environment for the child. This study broadly asks: In the field of special education, how do parents make decisions for their D/HH child? Data is drawn from semi-structured, ethnographic interviews with 16 educators of the deaf or hard-of-hearing (EODs) across public, private, and state levels in California.IMPACT STATEMENT The findings can help contribute academic research into conversation with social justice-oriented work to improve language and educational access for D/HH children.