The meaning of communication to a group of deaf college students: a multidimensional perspective

The purpose of this study was to investigate the meaning of communication to deaf college students and to explore with them the range of skills and conditions that they consider important for communication. Ethnographic interviews with 23 first-year students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID at RIT) were used to gather information about communication. Analysis of the interviews led to the organization of informants' comments into four dimensions of communication, including language-modality, affective, situational, and sociopolitical. These dimensions were then used to develop a multidimensional perspective on communication. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of a multidimensional perspective on communication for the development of comprehensive communication training programs for deaf people.