Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

College

College of Science and Health

First Advisor

Shelly Rauvola

Abstract

Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) workers report routinely missing workplace information that hearing colleagues receive through informal and ambient channels, as well as constrained participation in environments where communication norms treat hearing as the default. Despite over a century of research, this literature remains largely outside flagship industrial-organizational (IO) psychology journals. This dissertation conducts an integrative systematic review of 48 empirical studies published between 1919 and 2025, examining workplace outcomes and methodological patterns, the theoretical frameworks deployed, sampling and reporting practices, and the framing and identity-language conventions through which the literature engages DHH workers. The review appears predominantly in WORK and rehabilitation-oriented outlets rather than in premier IO journals and engages DHH workers primarily through functional or audiological framings that locate the analytic problem in the worker rather than in the workplace. Two constructs emerge from the synthesis. Communication Access Climate (CAC) captures the extent to which workplaces enable full, spontaneous participation in the information ecology of the organization, defined by information equivalence, participatory spontaneity, relational access, and distribution of communication responsibility. Access-management labor names the additional, often invisible physical, cognitive, and emotional work that disabled individuals must perform simply to gain equal access to a space, conversation, or task. Across the review, two patterns of disciplinary engagement emerge: silence in the unexamined absence of DHH workers from IO psychology's research agenda, and silencing in the framing patterns that have produced the engagement that does exist. These findings position the workplace communication environment, rather than the worker who navigates it, as the analytical target a future IO literature on DHH workers.

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