Monday, December 10, 2007

expert update

Just to make fill in the blog with the rest of my expert experience....

I exchanged a couple more emails after initially speaking to David Zajac. He told me that he feels the worst part about a speech impairment is lowered self esteem while the worst part of hearing loss is social isolation. The two often go hand in hand since
"we basically speak the way we hear" and these individuals cannot hear well. He also stated that "profoundly deaf individuals often have limited speech, thus the social isolation".

I tried to talk to an educational expert on campus like suggested by Corrinne. However, that was even more pointless than the first interview since the health professionals on campus focus on college students opposed to the children I am researching in my paper. I got mainly general information that I already had before. I should have talked to someone who deals with younger kids but time did not permit this.

So I guess overall I was not a big fan of the expert interview since I have such a narrow topic that it is hard to get in contact with someone who directly researches with what I am researching.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

research

I've been going over a lot of what people had to say on Poster Day. A lot of the comments really helped and let me know about the holes I had in my explanations and research. I think I have finally accepted the fact that my topic is quite narrow, and if I can make sure I have enough information to write a well-supported paper I will. It is amazing how many sources I have consulted and am taking such little pieces of information out of most of them.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Expert

As my expert, I is talked to David Zajac a professor in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences here at UNC. He has earned a PhD in Communication Disorders, a Masters in Speech Pathology/Audiology , and a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology from the University of Pittsburg. He focuses on speaking with craniofacial abnormalities.

He informed me that the most common cause of hearing impairment from birth is OME. I have found a lot of research on OME, and I am thinking about narrowing my topic even more to focus only on this condition. However overall, I am not sure this expert interview was that enlightening. He reaffirmed most of my research, but since he is not a specialist in education or children I did not learn as much as I hoped. I think I am going to conduct a second expert interview with someone in the education field, and hopefully between the two interviews and study fields I can shed more light on my research.