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The pattern of results suggests that cochlear implants may be effective in improving deaf children's communication and social skills.

To examine factors that affect relationships between deaf children who use cochlear implants or hearing aids and their hearing siblings. Study Design: Qualitative analysis of interview data from parents of deaf children. Participants: Parents of 29 deaf children with at least 1 sibling; 20 children used cochlear implants and 9 used hearing aids. Main Outcome Measure: Quality of deaf-hearing sibling relationships as assessed by an ordinal scale developed by the authors. Results: Birth order, family size, parents' anxiety about deafness, and negative comparisons by parents of hearing and deaf siblings were key factors in sibling relationships. Conclusions: Family context is important in understanding experiences of deaf children and their hearing siblings. The model replaces assumptions of hearing loss as individual disability with an emphasis on the social determinants of managing differences in siblings' hearing status.When examining children with disabilities, research has typically focused on the adjustment of the child with a disability, with less attention paid to how the presence of the child affects the adjustment of others in the child's environment. A recently proposed family systems approach attributes children's functioning to the individual characteristics of the child with a disability as well as the child's social environment (Stoneman & Brody, 1993). Viewed from this perspective, when one member of the family has a disability, all members of the household Yael Bat-Chava and Daniela Martin, League for the Hard of Hearing,

Ideological positions regarding social diversity and status inequality are examined as predictors of people's willingness to engage in collective action. Using social dominance theory and social identity theory, we hypothesized that the relationships between ideology, ethnic identification, and orientation toward collective action will vary depending on the position of one's group. Comparisons were made between four U.S. groups: White natives, White immigrants, Black/Latino natives, and Black/Latino immigrants. Groups differed in their endorsement of social diversity and social inequality, as well as in their orientation toward collective action and their ethnic group identification. For all groups, ethnic identity mediated the link between ideology and collective action, but the valence and magnitude of paths differed as a function of ethnicity and immigrant status. Social diversity was more critical for U.S. immigrants (White and Black/Latino); social inequality accounted for more variance in native-born U.S. groups (although in opposite directions for the two groups).