Demographics

Social Patterns: Demographics

Demography is the scientific study of human population dynamics—influences on population size, growth, decline, or stability. Population members are either born or migrate into it and leave by either dying or migrating out of it. For Deaf Studies, the distinctions between big “D” vs. little “d” designations for who is d/Deaf are added to such considerations as geopolitical boundaries, birth cohorts, fertility, marriage, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender as differences affecting population dynamics. Three perspectives influence demographic descriptions of d/Deaf populations. They are known as the medical, social, and cultural perspectives.

Medical

The medical perspective focuses on how well people perceive sound. Often, this is understood in terms of hearing trouble, which describes the degree to which people are able to hear easily what they hope or are expected to hear, particularly speech sounds, without the aid of an assistive listening device. However, hearing sensitivity extends beyond speech sounds and varies in its frequency profile. So, more generally, deafness is a degree of hearing construct least characteristic of typical or normal hearing.

Social

Instead of addressing a person’s hearing function in isolation, this perspective considers whether people who experience auditory difference encounter disabling barriers to social participation or impeded access to opportunities taken for granted by those with no issues with hearing condition. In this view, to be deaf, the little “d” designation, is to be at risk of disability or discrimination due to the barriers and impediments built into a society’s routines of social interaction as well as its technological and built environments.

Cultural

The third perspective considers whether people become members of a Deaf community, the big “D” designation. A Deaf community is a people for whom seeing and signed language, rather than hearing and spoken language, are central to collective and personal identity. This community is where people who are deaf have restructured social interaction through signed language, and possibly redeployed technical and materials means, to create and sustain a Deaf culture. Only by drawing from all [Page 296]three of these perspectives can a comprehensive demographic description be obtained.

Entry at Birth

Universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) has transformed the process of detection and, as a consequence, has changed the demographic profile of childhood deafness. In the past, knowing whether a child is deaf at birth was not always easily discerned. Now, UNHS provides much higher certainty about whether a child is born deaf, though many developing nations do not provide UNHS. By age 3 months, in developed nations, fewer than 1 in 1,000 of the total child population is identified as experiencing deafness—severe, profound, or having complete inability to hear—whereas the incidence is at least two (perhaps as much as seven) times greater in developing nations. Of children who are deaf at birth, based upon studies in the USA, the proportion born into Deaf families is about eight percent (that is, under 4 per 100,000 of the total child population).

The incidence of deafness is greater using the World Health Organization’s (WHO) concept of disabling hearing construct, however, because it includes moderate or moderately severe hearing condition as well as severe, profound or complete hearing condition. By the WHO standard, for all families, the incidence of disabling hearing at birth is about four times greater, but it is only double for those born to Deaf parents because, though the birth of a deaf child is rare, Deaf parents are more likely to have children who are deaf. Using the WHO standard also leads to gender differences. Though there is hardly any difference at birth among children who are deaf, boys are noticeably more likely to have a disabling hearing construct.

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