Good that those questions were asked but they did not include all those individuals as part of the research. The study you participated is limited to only what they are researching. For example, if they are researching about the effectiveness of CI in elementary educational settings. The researcher(s) will focus only elementary children with CIs. They will not include children with CIs in the junior high or high school. Now that they are focused on elementary school children with CIs, they will ask questions (known as variables) to see what external “forces” play in this effectiveness. It is the variables that can be manipulated by inclusion or exclusion into the final report.
Another example….unemployment is now at around 10 percent. This percentage is highly published. Do you believe it? Many people do. The truth is that the unemployment rate is a lot higher than 10 percent. It is like 17 percent. Why the differences? It is the variable that they excluded…..part-time employees, seasonally adjusted labor force and so forth. In the 10 percent unemployment, the part-time employees are excluded. Do we really know the actual unemployment rate?
My point? I want the QOL study to be full scale and unbiased to include all the populations that I mentioned previously. Deafness, in and of itself, is the one of the most hotly contested, divisional and controversial topic throughout the history of the deaf. Isn’t it about time to play nice together and truly work together? 
