The effect of an early social-emotional intervention on thesocial development of 0-3 years old children with hearing loss

Children with hearing loss are more likely to fail in social skills due tocommunication limitations than their hearing counterparts, which in turn can severely affect a child’ssocial skills in the future. Given the importance of this issue and the need for such programs in timelyinterventions of these children, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of timely emotionalsocialintervention program on social development of children with hearing loss less than three years.

In this quasi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design witha control group, 16 children with hearing loss were selected from Atra Speech Therapy Center in Karajusing existing methods and considering entry and exit criteria. The instrument used was the Wilde SocialDevelopment Questionnaire. The obtained data were analyzed using analysis of covariance in SPSSsoftware version 20.

The results of covariance analysis showed that socio-emotional intervention had a significanteffect on the social development of hearing loss children (p<0.0001) .the intervention improved thechildren’s social development in the intervention group compared to the control group.

It seems that a socio-emotional intervention program can improve the social developmentof hearing loss children. It is recommended that social skill programs in the early interventional programscould improve the social skills of children with hearing loss in the early years.