Specific manifestations of sandwich generation effect in deaf parents and CODA families

Abstract

The main group of interest in this study are deaf parents of hearing children and the aim is to describe the phenomenon of the inverted sandwich generation effect with deaf parents of hearing children. The basic research framework for this study was Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as defined by Smith et al. (Smith, J. A., Larkin, M., & Flowers, P. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. Sage.). Five themes were defined—grandparent help, child help with interpretation and life support, help from neighbors and others, parental dependency, child independence, and interpretation of childhood and parenthood. These themes were interpreted by analyzing data from two groups of respondents—deaf parents and their hearing children (children of deaf adults). The main finding relates to the reverse sandwich model operating within these generations.