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20. Deaf and Hearing Adults' Evaluation of Deaf People's Occupational Competence
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Deaf and Hearing Adults' Evaluation of Deaf People's Occupational Competence Amatzia Weisel 20 UNDERSTANDING THE development of persons with physical disabilities requires attention to both the psychological and social factors that affect it. Wright (1983) stated that the field of rehabilitation should deal with those variations in the physical characteristics of the individual that directly alter the individual's path of development by their effects on the individual's functioning, on other people's perception of the individual, and on the individual 's self-perception. This definition suggested that the full meaning of a disabling condition cannot be understood on the basis of the objective medicalor psychological diagnosis and description of the condition itself. Rather, environmental factors-mainly the attitudes, perceptions, and expectations of significant others and the person with the disability-play an important role in the course of his or her development. This definition further suggested that the process is not a unidirectional one in which others' attitudes affect the individual's development; rather they are reciprocal in nature, that is, the individual perceives the physical condition and social attitudeswhich influences the individual's attitudes and perceptions-that are, in turn, perceived by others. In this theoretical context, the attitudes and expectations of the individual with the disabling condition, as well as those of others, are considered important factors in shaping the developmental process . Attitudes of hearing people were often considered a barrier to the social , and especially occupational adjustment of deaf people (e.g., McCarthy 1988; Schroedel and Schiff 1972; Strong and Shaver 1991). The goals of the present investigation were to study the evaluation of the occupational competence of deaf people by deaf and hearing adults, and to examine the relationships between these evaluations and general attitudes toward deaf people and the acceptance of deafness. Hearing adults' attitudes are compared to the attitudes of deaf people themselves. One of the main goals of the developmental process is the establishment of an adequate occupational career. McCarthy (1988, 246) stated that "employment is, for most adults, the primary source of not only income, but also identity and interactions, if not satisfactions." In general, deaf people have a 231 232 AMATZIA WEISEL lower educational level compared to hearing people, which leads to a lower professional rank (Sela and Weisel 1992). Recent findings have shown that the rates of unemployment among Israel's deaf population were not much higher than among its hearing people. However, Schein (1989, 166) argued that deaf people "tend to be more adversely affected than workers in general in periods of economic decline." This means that fluctuations in the rates ()f employment should be considered and it can be misleading to generalize across different periods of time. In addition to the difficulties involved in getting a job, there is a high rate of underemployment of deaf people. Both U..S. data and Israeli data showed that underemployment was relatively frequent among the deaf and that they tended to work in jobs that required less formal education, training, and experience than they actually had (Sela and Weisel 1992). Underemployment had severe financial consequences-deaf workers made much less money than their comparably educated hearing counterparts (Welsh 1991). Underemployment may be related to the tendency to avoid changing one's work place, even when a new work place offers higher occupational status. Sela and Weisel (1992) found that occupational promotion was positively related to the number of work places tIle person changed during the course of his or her career. Underemployment may be the result of negative attitudes and low evaluation of the deaf workers ' competence by hearing employers, as well as the deaf workers' low aspirations and expectations of themselves. In other words, the evaluation of occupational competence may be related to the perceptions of the disabling condition in general and to the attitudes toward deaf people as a group. There are complex interrelationships between occupational expectation.s, attitudes toward deaf people, and the acceptance of one's deafness. For exarnple , Bat-Chava (1994) found that deaf people who tended to have a higher group identity had a higher self-esteem. However, the relationships between self-esteem and occupational expectations of deaf people in general are not clear. A deaf person may make a distinction between his or her selfevaluation and the evaluation of the deaf as a group. Furthermore, it is possible to speculate that some deaf people may have a strong identification with the Deaf community or strong involvement with this community withOllt having...