The Deaf Acculturative Stress Inventory: Development and Validation of an Acculturative Stress Inventory for Deaf Adults

Acculturative stress represents the effects of the struggles involved in acculturation, including pressures to retain or acquire aspects of one’s heritage culture, as well as pressures to acquire aspects of the dominant culture (Rodriguez, Myers, Mira, Flores, & Garcia-Hernandez, 2002; Schwartz & Zamboanga, 2008).

To date, no measure exists for assessing the acculturative stress experiences of deaf individuals, a unique, culturally minoritized group within the dominant society.

A previous study examined levels of acculturative stress among a sample of deaf university students using a modified version of the 24-item Societal Attitudinal Familial and Environmental Acculturative Stress Scale (SAFE; Mena, Padilla, & Maldonado, 1987), named the SAFE-D (Aldalur, 2017).

Results indicated that the SAFE-D demonstrated excellent reliability among the sample and that the deaf participants reported experiencing levels of acculturative stress similar to late immigrant university students (Mena et al., 1987) and English as a Second Language students (Hovey, 2000).

It was noted during the modification of the scale and analyses of the data, however, that the acculturation experiences of deaf individuals differ in significant ways from those of ethnically and racially minoritized individuals (Aldalur, 2017). Also, the results suggested that a bidirectional model of acculturative stress would more accurately capture the experiences of deaf individuals (Aldalur, 2017).

Therefore, the development of a separate scale specific to the acculturative stress experiences of deaf individuals is necessary. The goal of the current study is to develop the Deaf Acculturative Stress Inventory (DASI) and collect information regarding the reliability and validity of the scale for use with deaf adults.