Empirical Article
Factors Affecting Psychosocial Adjustment of Deaf Students
Filiz Polat
University of Manchester
Deafness is more than a medical condition. Recent theories have emphasized the importance of environmental factors on the psychosocial development of deaf children. As part of a larger scale study, this article aims to investigate the impact of the following variables on deaf students' psychosocial adjustment in Turkey: student-related background and experiential characteristics, parent-related variables, school-related factors, and teacher-related variables. The sample of 1,097 deaf students enrolled in the elementary, secondary, and high schools was drawn from 34 schools in 24 cities on a national geographical spread. The multiple regression analysis revealed that degree of hearing loss, additional handicap, and age at onset of deafness were negatively related to psychosocial adjustment of deaf students. However, there was a positive relationship between psychosocial variables and some of the independent variables, such as use of hearing aids, speech intelligibility, academic achievement, parental hearing status, and communication methods used at school. The findings of the study do not support a "pathological" view of deafness, suggesting that it was not deafness per se but that some environmental factors were also influential on the psychosocial adjustment of deaf students.
This work was funded by the Turkish Ministry of Education. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Turkish Ministry of Education. The author would like to thank all schools, teachers, and students who participated in this study. Versions of this article were presented at XIVth Congress of Cross-Cultural Psychology, August 1998, Washington, DC; at the Annual Meeting of American Educational Research Association (AERA), April 2000, New Orleans, LA; and at the Annual Convention of the Council for Exceptional Children, British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, April 2000. Correspondence should be sent to Filiz Polat, Educational Support and Inclusion, Faculty of Education, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK M13 9PL (e-mail:
filiz.polat@man.ac.uk)
Received August 19, 2002; revised November 8, 2002; accepted December 5, 2002
