This project will develop, implement, and evaluate a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, accessible, interactive, and unbiased website to provide information for parents of children with hearing loss, health-care professionals, educators, and other individuals and institutions in order to facilitate informed decision making in regard to treatment choice. This web site will apply the knowledge gained in previous studies of parental decision making about the specific needs of parents, the barriers they faced, and the resources that have proved useful. Content on the site will conform to standards established to assure health information quality, credibility, and currency and will be constructed in a manner which will make it accessible to a wide audience, including underserved minorities and individuals with hearing loss. Parents and professionals will be incorporated into the development process through a series of focus groups, surveys, and evaluations of the site throughout project development and through participation on an advisory board. When fully operational the site will provide users with 1) access to information on a wide range of topics, including links to other sites with valuable information; 2) a computer-interactive decision aid, with privacy ensured, through which parents can explore and clarify their own personal objectives, decision making style, and the options that are most appropriate for their individual family. Parents who use this tool will be directed to other areas of the website selected specifically to match their individual needs, goals, and values. 3) answers to individual questions from a multidisciplinary group of experts; 4) first-person accounts of the experiences of other families facing similar circumstances; 5) materials on topics such as how to communicate with a deaf baby regardless of communication modality and how to include a deaf toddler in a hearing day care setting; and 6) first-person narratives from adults and children with hearing loss. Narrative accounts will be available as text or video and will be interpreted, captioned, or translated into ASL as appropriate. An outreach campaign will accompany development of this site in order to make all information available to people with limited access to computers and the Internet.
