Download or read book Establishing a Normative Sample of Black Deaf Individualson the 58-item Deaf Acculturation Scale (DAS) written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within liberal European and North American societies identity development occurs through a person observing others, experimenting with different roles, considering how others perceive those roles, and fine-tuning the collections of roles. The current study sought to identify and analyze how Black deaf and hard-of-hearing people conceptualize their deaf and hard-of-hearing identities. That is, what cultural and linguistic factors are involved and how do they interact? To better understand Deaf cultural identity, Maxwell-McCaw and Zea developed the Deaf Acculturation Scale (DAS: Maxwell-McCaw, 2001) and administered it to 3,070 deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Fewer than 300 of those respondents self-identified themselves as racial/ethnic minorities (i.e., Hispanic/Latino, Black, or Asian). This author conducted statistical analyses on archival data from Maxwell-McCaw's research as part of a preliminary study (Nelson Schmitt, 2011). The number of respondents in each racial/ethnic minority group was too small to appropriately analyze through statistical means, so they were combined into a single "Non-White" group. Results of a confirmatory factor analysis revealed that deaf individuals who self-identified as racial/ ethnic minorities responded to items in ways that significantly differed from responses provided by White deaf individuals. Moreover, the existing five-factor correlated model of the DAS (i.e., cultural identification, cultural involvement, cultural preferences, cultural knowledge, and language competence) did not fit well with the sample of deaf people of color. The current study addressed this gap in the research by administering the DAS to a new and larger sample of Black deaf individuals. A principal components analysis was conducted on the data to determine an appropriate factor structure for this population. In addition to the existing five factors, a sixth factor emerged in this analysis that appears to reflect identity concerns that are specific to Black deaf people. Post-hoc analyses on demographic data revealed how self-identification of hearing status correlated with acculturative styles. Future research should focus on establishing normative samples for other minority deaf groups, developing additional ethnicity-specific questions to increase the applicability of the DAS to diverse groups, and examining the intersections of Deaf cultural identity and racial identity by administering the DAS and a measure of racial/ethnic identity. - Abstract.