The Conditioning of Understanding of Social Causality by Deaf Primary School Students on Family Characteristics

The most important natural condition for the social development of the personality of any child is full-fledged interpersonal communication, which is impossible without the elementary skills of a cause-and-effect analysis of a problem situation of interaction based on an understanding of social causality, identifying causal relationships between the actions of individuals in the process of joint activity and communication. The process of developing an understanding of social causality in a child with hearing impairment has its own specifics. These children have difficulty mastering the logical connections and relationships between phenomena, events and people's actions. This hinders both their adequate assessment of others and the formation of an understanding of social causality. There is a relationship between the emotional, moral and social development of deaf children and the characteristics of the parental family. In families where both the child and the parents have hearing impairments, emotional relationships develop that are close to those that are typical for hearing families. In contrast, hearing parents cannot develop the same successful relationship with their children. Thus, the focus of our attention is the conditionality of the understanding of social causality by deaf junior schoolchildren by the characteristics of the family. Based on the foregoing, the purpose of the study is to analyze the influence of the characteristics of a family with deaf and hearing parents on the general level of development of a child's understanding of social causality, which will optimize this process in a family and educational organization. The paper presents the results of our own experimental study, containing a qualitative analysis of empirical data. It has been established that the impoverishment of understanding of social causality in deaf children with hearing parents is largely due to the inability of adult hearing people to provoke small deaf children to emotional communication. Deaf elementary school students raised by deaf parents are relatively more socially adapted and have a greater level of development of understanding of social causality than deaf elementary school students from families of hearing parents. The results of the study can be used as a basis for purposeful correctional and developmental work with deaf junior schoolchildren and their families to develop an understanding of social causation.