Using wearable sensors to explore schoolyard interactions of mainstreamed deaf and hard-of-hearing preadolescents

Social participation in school, including schoolyard interactions, is considered important for all aspects of child development. Students with disabilities, such as those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, are at risk of experiencing inaccessibility and social exclusion in mainstream classes, yet this has been hardly researched in the schoolyard context. We exploratively compared preadolescents (M = 10.48, SD =.93) with (N = 8) and without (N = 207) hearing loss in their continuous schoolyard interactions during 21 recess assessments, using proximity sensors and field observations, alongside measurements of peer acceptance, friendships and sense of connectedness, based on peer nominations and self-reports. Deaf and hard-of-hearing preadolescents spent less time interacting in the schoolyard, a trend which was stable throughout recess. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students interacted with the same number of partners as their classmates, but posthoc analyses suggest that towards the end of long recess periods they had a sharper drop in the number of their interaction partners. Field observations suggest that deaf and hard-of-hearing preadolescents who were socially active became more isolated the longer the break lasted, and that physical proximity did not necessarily indicate positive interactions. Findings underscore the importance of using multimethod designs that assess various dimensions of social participation and account for the temporal dynamics of recess interactions. Proximity sensors, combined with qualitative observations, enabled to detect social difficulties not detected by more traditional measures, hence valuable for social inclusion research and interventions.