How social status matters Language revised Jepsen and Bengtsson.edited time 22:16

Abstract

This article outlines a micro-social social status theory to explore how inclusive education works out for adolescents with hearing loss. Advanced medical treatment and hearing aids enable inclusive education across societies, but research finds communicative and psychosocial peer difficulties indicating barriers to inclusion. Social status is not explored much in the hearing loss field. Framing our theory against the backdrop of the biosocial model, we advance a theory of how social status is an evolutionary trait of humans' normative and emotional perception to acknowledge and evaluate each others worth. We determine how insider status derives reciprocal exchange relations of attentiveness within primary reference groups, generating a person-to-group standing of equality. One-way exchange relations generate inequality, pushing towards outsider standing. In line with key insights from medical sociology, disability originates in variable but persistently constraining impairment effects that we qualify as fatigue, miscommunication, and behavioural withdrawal from the peer group. A key contribution is our design of an analytical status continuum of insider, peripherical, marginal and outsider person-to-group standings that we employ in a comparative case study of person-to-group standings among 15 adolescents with hearing loss in general elementary schools versus a boarding school. In the former, they experienced diverse social statuses compared to their insider status as a co-enrolled group at an independent boarding school supporting mixed peer groupings across disabilities and backgrounds. We explain why and provide recommendations in support of inclusive education.