Abstract
Cultural life scripts have been defined by research as culturally shared expectations and public knowledge of primarily positive life events that occur in sequence in an individual’s prototypical life course. In contrast, life stories are based on personal experiences and life events within one’s own life. They represent autobiographical memories that are part of episodic memory. A mixed methodology was used with two studies. First, the quantitative component investigated whether the life scripts and life stories of deaf individuals who grew up using spoken language in hearing families were similar to the life scripts and life stories of hearing individuals or culturally Deaf individuals. Then, a qualitative narrative analysis captured a more detailed description of how these individuals recalled growing up as an oral deaf person, and later being exposed to sign language and Deaf culture. Both studies highlighted the importance of communication in both positive and negative ways.
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Notes
Deaf refers to people who are members of the Deaf culture while deaf refers to people who are not. This idea is expanded more on page 7.
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Acknowledgments
The data collection for this research was supported by a grant from Gallaudet Research Institute Small Grants to Caroline Suggs, M. Diane Clark, Dorri Daggett, Kristen Harmon, Lisa van der Mark, Shelley Williams, and Emily Wojahn. Suggs, Daggett, van der Mark, Williams, and Wojahn were supported by Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) under the National Science Foundation (grant number SBE-1041725) at Gallaudet University. This work is a secondary analysis of the earlier collected data. We want to thank Shelley Williams and Dorri Daggett for their involvement in the project, as well as the participants who made the study possible. Part of this research by Suggs, Williams, Daggett, van derk Mark, and Clark was presented during a poster session at the 2012 annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, DC. In addition, part of the manuscript by Wolsey and Clark was presented during a poster session at the 2015 annual meeting of the Association of College Educators - Deaf and Hard of Hearing, St. Louis, MO. This manuscript was developed in a writing class at Gallaudet University. A special thank you and appreciation to M. Diane Clark for her mentorship and support, as well as classmates, Heather G. Zimmerman and Yasmeen Alhasawi for their peer reviews.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Ju-Lee A. Wolsey declares that she has no conflict of interest. M. Diane Clark declares that she has no conflict of interest. Lisa van der Mark declares that she has no conflict of interest. Caroline Suggs declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10882-016-9490-4.
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Wolsey, JL.A., Clark, M.D., van der Mark, L. et al. Life Scripts and Life Stories of Oral Deaf Individuals. J Dev Phys Disabil 29, 77–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-016-9487-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-016-9487-z