Effectiveness of Communication Skills Training on Interpersonal Relationships, Resilience, and Stress in People with Hearing Impairment

The first and most important issue of hearing-impaired children is communication problems because they are often unable to interact with peers and adults. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the effectiveness of communication skills training on interpersonal relationship, resilience, and stress in people with hearing impairment.

The research method is quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design with experimental and control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of deaf people with the mean age of 15 years in Tehran in the academic year of 2018. 30 subjects were selected by convenience sampling method and were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The effective communication skills training program was administered to the experimental group for ten 90 min sessions but the control group did not receive any intervention. Interpersonal Skills Questionnaire (Matson, 1983), Resiliency (Connor & Davidson, 1) and Perceived Stress Questionnaire (Cohen, 1983) were used as research tools.

The results of univariate analysis of covariance showed that effective communication skills training were effective on interpersonal relationships (P = 0.01, F = 26.29), resilience (P = 0.03, F = 5.27) and stress in (P = 0.01, F = 22.60) hearing impaired children, so that this intervention was able to increase interpersonal relationships and resiliency in the experimental group, and reduce their stress levels.

The results of the present study showed that the communication skills program training was able to prepare the experimental group for effective coping with interpersonal problems and reinforce the psychological need for communication and belonging.