Development of parent resources for families of deaf children

Watch this video to find out about our project

Find out more

If you are interested in taking part in our project, please click here and fill in your details. We’ll then get in touch with more information. Alternatively, you can email our researcher, Jamila Dorner jamila.dorner@ucl.ac.uk.

About the project

We are conducting a study to understand parents’ experiences of having a baby or young child with either mild hearing loss or unilateral hearing loss, which is in one single ear. We would like to understand what kind of information parents need and what it’s like for parents to make decisions for their baby or young child. This study is funded by the National Deaf Children’s Society.

Knowing about parent’s experience will enable our team to develop – along with parents – resources that can help other parents to make the right decision – or ‘informed decisions’ – for their child. Importantly, it will improve the care of children with mild or unilateral hearing loss. It will also provide clear guidelines for the audiology team to help families.

Here are some of the questions that we would like to explore with you.

How did you find out about your child’s hearing loss?
What kind of support was there at this time?
How did you make decisions for your child?
What is important to know to make the right decisions?

January 2024

We have already interviewed a number of parents and we are now particularly interested to hear from parents whose child is age 0-4 years old and has been identified through newborn hearing screening as having either mild or unilateral deafness/hearing loss (either temporary or permanent) who have any of the following experiences:

Families with a child with mild deafness/hearing loss in both ears.
Families where English is not their first or primary language (an interpreter can be provided).
Families with more than one child.

If you would like to share your experience, you can fill in the form for prospective participants and we will be in touch with more information so that you can choose to participate or not. If you do participate, we will find a convenient time to do an interview of an hour with you. This interview will be online and you will receive a voucher to thank you for your time and participation.

Get involved

Meet the team

Click here to find out more about our research team

Project progress – May 2023

We have interviewed a number of mums so far. Several of our participants have highlighted the importance of this research, listening to the experience of parents and ensuring that their voices matter when it comes to making decisions for their child. Some comments from the interviews have been:

‘Thank you so much. It’s been a lovely interview. Very lovely!’

‘It’s good you’re doing this research because it’s good to make your own decision but it’s quite hard to make a decision for someone else, even if it’s a baby.’

We are continuing to recruit and we would love to hear from dads about their experiences! Fill in the form for prospective participants and we’ll be in touch with more information.