Listman
Colayori, Kailea, et al. "Perceiving Being Deaf as a Negative Attribute is a Resilience Risk Factor for Deaf College Students." Inter-Science of Learning Centers. Inter-Science of Learning Centers. Pittsburgh, PA. 6 Mar. 2014. Conference Presentation.
Normacly is generally enforced by the society, and outliers who are perceived as disabled are often pitied (Davis, 1995; Hauser, O’Hearn, McKee, Steider, & Thew, 2010). Yet there are individuals who are perceived by others as “disabled” but appear to lead productive lives with a healthy quality of life. Here, we ask, does the self-perception as oneself being disabled have a negative affect on one’s ability to cope with stress and adversity (resilience)? Some have suggested that being deaf is a not a resilience risk factor but that internalizing the society’s negative perspective of being deaf (viz., audism) is the risk factor (Listman, Rogers, & Hauser, 2011; Young, Green, & Rogers, 2008). We hypothesize that deaf individuals who perceive being deaf as good (i.e., those who resist audism) will have higher levels of resilience than those who perceive being deaf as bad (i.e., those who internalize audism).
Method
Participants: 54 Deaf college students (Mage = 21.6, SDage = 2.3; 44% female) with no visual, neurological, or motor difficulties.
Primary Materials: The Deaf Implicit Association Test (IAT), similar to the Race IAT (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), was developed to measure attitudes toward deaf people. At the beginning, participants memorized photos of four “deaf” and four “hearing” individuals (different color photo frames for each group). The standard IAT conditions and procedures were used and IAT “D” were computed following the IAT scoring algorithm (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003). Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC, Connor & Davidson, 2003) was used to measure resilience including participants’ sense of personal competence, tolerance of negative affects, positive acceptance of change, trust in one’s instincts, sense of social support, and an action-oriented approach to problem solving.
Other Materials: American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test; Deaf Acculturation Scale; Hollingshead SES; Kaufman-Brief Intelligence Test-Second Edition; and, Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised.
Procedure: Individuals who are fluent signers tested all participants individually.
Results
The median IAT D score (MD = .32913813) was used to split the sample population representing the top 50% biased towards perceiving “Deaf” as favorable (Deaf = Good) and the other 50% biased towards perceiving “Deaf” as unfavorable (Deaf = Bad). The two groups did not differ based on SES, age, gender, IQ, reading skill, or frequency of IAT errors. Those who perceived “Deaf” as good, compared to those who perceived “Deaf” as bad, had higher levels of resilience measured by the CD-RISC, t(32) – 7.071, p.