Adolescents’ experiences of cochlear implantation

Abstract

The goal of this study was to explore the experiences of five adolescents who had undergone a cochlear implantation. The “Pretoria Cochlear Implant Centre” and the “Johannesburg Cochlear Implant Centre” were approached to obtain participants for the study. Four of the participants were adolescents between the ages of 15 to 18 years, while one participant was in the late adolescence/early adulthood phase, being 20 years of age. The research was conducted within the narrative metaphor. Unstructured interviews were conducted with the participants, the material transcribed by the researcher and the narratives analyzed by means of the “Three-dimensional Space Approach”. The research was conducted within the guidelines of the Postgraduate and Ethics Committees of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The narratives revealed that all the participants experience the cochlear implant as having a positive influence on various aspects of their lives, and also enabled them to move between a “society with silence” and a “society with sound”.