Does Deafness Affect Resilience?

Resilience is a positive psychological characteristic that contributes to mental health and adjustment under challenging conditions, such as deafness. Deafness is a traumatic experience and causes communication disorders; it may also affect resilience.

We compared the resilience of deaf signers to that of a matched group of hearing individuals.

This comparative study was performed to assess self-evaluated resilience in 45 deaf signers and in 76 matched hearing subjects from Hamadan, Iran. Resilience scores were measured using a modified connor-davidson resilience scale.

The average resilience score was 61.20 in deaf signers and 62.8 in hearing subjects; however, this difference was not statistically significant. The resilience score was different in female and male deaf participants. It was 65.22 for male deaf participants (SD = 10.4) and 55.17 for female deaf participants (SD = 16.1), and this difference was statistically significant (P = 0.014). The gender difference between the resilience scores of hearing participants (male, 66.24 [SD = 16.7] and female, 59.36 [SD = 13.9]) was not significant (P = 0.057).

Similar resilience scores in deaf and hearing participants may be due to appropriate interaction of deaf signers with family members and society. Male deaf subjects were more resilient than female ones; studies should be done to examine the effects of cultural characteristics that may provide females with less communication opportunities than males.