The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

7-1989

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Department

Child and Family Studies

College

School of Education

First Advisor

Pamm Mattick

Second Advisor

Glen Palm

Third Advisor

Floyd Ayers

Keywords and Subject Headings

Comparing deafness identification with/without newborn hearing screening

Abstract

This research was designed to determine if a relationship existed between the age a hearing impaired child was identified and the child-find system used to identify that child. Also examined was the efficacy of Utah's organized statewide child-find system compared to the less organized systems of New York, Arkansas, Ohio, and Minnesota. A third component of the study, a comparison of the SKl*HI Language Development Scale Receptive and Expressive language level test scores, was not completed because all data was sent to the author categorized by state as frequency numbers and percentages instead of being separated into individual child data cases.

Subjects for the study were 604 children, ages one to 78 months, from Utah, New York, Arkansas, Ohio, and Minnesota. Included were male and female children with hearing impairments whose program supervisors completed and submitted data to the SKl*HI data collection center. Computer print-outs, measuring frequencies and percentages, on 11 variables, including the age of identification, LOS Expressive and Receptive test scores, and degree of hearing loss were used to analyze the data.

The research found that a higher percent of the hearing impaired children from Utah were identified earlier than the children from New York, Arkansas, Ohio, and Minnesota. Other findings indicated that more children with milder losses were identified earlier and that children from Utah were fitted with hearing aids earlier than those children from New York, Arkansas, Ohio, and Minnesota.

The data base for this study was hindered by such things as incorrect data form completion, unavailable data, format of the data sent from the SKl*HI data collection center, and lack of funding to enter submitted data into the SKI*HI data collection computer system. The adjustments that were made limit generalizations of this data.

Additional follow-up research should be done using an itemized child-to-child data print-out to obtain data that would allow analysis of the differences in language levels, treatment times, hearing losses, and other handicapping conditions among the children from the five states. Furthermore, an investigation should be done to determine which variable increased the number of identified children with hearing impairments, an organized child-find system or a more structured data collection system.

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