Cognitive Ability and Personality in the Vocational Adjustment of the Profoundly Deaf

Abstract

This paper describes a study of the Vocational Adjustment of a sample of 99 young workers who qualify for inclusion on the disablement register due to early profound deafness and concomitant speech handicap. Some results of this study are given and recently established techniques of improving Vocational Adjustment and stability derived from these results outlined. The starting point for a systematic approach to the improvement of Vocational Adjustment is a follow-up study relating past and present occupations to standardised tests and ratings given some two years previously during the worker's sixteenth year. The follow-up criteria of Vocational Adjustment could have variously included vocational aspiration level, salary expectancy, job satisfaction, attitudes to authority, and supervisors assessments of efficiency but, due to the fact that the sample was widely dispersed throughout Scotland with virtually one work-place per person, economy dictated a simpler approach and the broader, more comprehensive c...