Friendship and Connection for Children who are Hard of Hearing: A scoping review

Children who are hard of hearing (HoH) are at an increased risk of experiencing psychosocial difficulties. Notably, children who are HoH have reported difficulty making and managing friendships. Friendship is foundational for the acquisition of key skills during childhood, and central to health, wellbeing and quality of life. Despite this understanding, there is limited synthesis of the available evidence discussing how children who are HoH make friends. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions about social participation for children who are HoH. This scoping review aims to map the breadth of available evidence on the development of friendships in children who are HoH. This will provide valuable insights into areas for future research. This review follows Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework and will be reported on against the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. A structured search of multidisciplinary electronic databases will occur, and studies will be screened first by title and abstract, then the remaining by full text against the eligibility criteria. The TARCiS recommendation statement will be used to conduct backwards citation searches. Quality appraisal of the included articles will be completed using the JBI Checklist for Analytical Cross-Sectional Studies. Data extraction will occur in Excel. A PRISMA flow diagram will be used to graphically depict the process of study identification, inclusion and exclusion; and findings will be summarised through descriptive analysis. Ethics board approval is not required because knowledge will be synthesised from published, publicly available literature, without involving human participants.