Goal fulfilment in school for the deaf and hearing impaired - batod

As with other questionnaire assessments, weprobably have an internal dropout caused byparents and schools not recognising themselvesin all the questions. We wanted to come incontact with several different types of hearingloss in many different contexts. This resulted ina certain number of specifically asked questionsand the questionnaire’s degree of internal nonresponseto those questions was high. Gatheringschool addresses from the parents involvedan initial non-response of about 30% but theprocedure was necessary as there is no nationalregister combining both disability and school.On the other hand, gathering addresses meantthat we could give the parents information aboutthe assessment at an early stage, thus giving themthe opportunity to decide whether to participate.The result was that we have pupils for whom thedetails come from both the parent and the schoolquestionnaire, pupils for whom the details onlycome from the parent questionnaire and somepupils for whom the details only come from theschool questionnaire.The responses we received were divided by typeof school. We then saw that the parents of pupilsin schools for the hearing impaired respondedto a slightly greater extent than the same pupils’teachers did (see table 7). As regards specialschool and school for pupils with learningdisabilities, the situation was the opposite: moreteachers than parents responded. But if we madea comparison with the population of pupils inschools for the hearing impaired and specialschools, we saw that the degree of response washighest for parents of children in schools for thehearing impaired while it was lowest for thosepupils’ teachers (59 and 37% respectively). Inthe autumn term, 464 pupils were in years 2‐10of special school and 360 pupils in years 2‐9 ofschools for the hearing impaired.According to the Association of Hard of HearingPeople’s statistics, 68% of the pupil group arewhat we call ‘individually placed’, 17% attendspecial school and 12% attend schools for thehearing impaired (HRF 2007). Bearing in mindthat in this report we also account for schoolfor pupils with learning disabilities, and thatthe Association of Hard of Hearing People inits statistics also reports on another group ofpupils who attend mainstreamed schools withan audiotory profile 3 , which constitutes about3%, it can be stated that the distribution in ourunderlying data reflects in general terms thesituation for deaf and hearing impaired pupilsin school. Although, as table 6 shows, we onlyhave a coverage ratio of just over 50% for theschool questionnaire, we have, on the otherhand, a distribution between the types of schoolsthat coincides with the Association of Hard ofHearing People’s statistics.A non-response analysis that the SIT conductedshowed that the difference between thegroups – those that responded and those thatdid not respond – was less than expected. Theconclusion was that the responses received inthe survey could, in spite of everything, beregarded as representative for the population(Coniavitis Gellerstedt 2007b). But there is stilla risk that non-response of the size in the currentstudy may contain systematic errors. It could,for instance, be expected that parents of highersocio-economic status were those who responded(Fortnum, Stacey & Summefield 2006).In our questionnaire, the rate of non-responseby parents and schools can therefore be deemedto be too great to allow any confident statementsto be made about the whole population. It is, onthe other hand, possible to make descriptionsof and comparisons between those who didrespond.The purpose of the questionnaires was to give anin-depth picture of and provide underlying datafor analysis of the results received in the gradecomparison. The numerical collection, in spite ofnon-response, provided sufficient data for this.3Audiotory profile = Schools where they make temporary arrangem,ents for hearing imaired pupils. E.g. Sign Language andcommunication classes, encourage hearing impaired pupilsGoal fulfilment in school for the deaf and hearing impaired33