Deaf Community Involvement in the Research Process

This chapter reviews a number of approaches to research involving deaf participants. The community-engaged research model (CEnR) is applied as a framework to highlight existing barriers to ethical conduct and strategies for successful community engagement in the research process. Strategies are proposed to address the challenges in educational and linguistic research involving deaf children and adult members of the Deaf community. Incorporating the collaborative participation of the Deaf community or their perspectives is argued to be critical to all phases of research decision making: navigating scientific paradigms, developing research questions, sampling, measurement, analysis, interpretation of findings, and publication activities. Collaboration within a CEnR framework promotes an interdisciplinary and intercultural analysis of signing communities and contributes to the creation of new knowledge, narratives, and strategies.