What Deaf or Hard of Hearing Workers Want in the Workplace: Analysis comments for a questionnaire survey of Deaf or Hard of Hearing employees at Company Z

This paper is a continuation of Nakayama et al. (2021) and reports on the analysis of the comments section of a questionnaire that was given to all deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) employees working at Company Z in 2020. The questionnaire included two comment sections that asked DHH workers about problems they had in communicating with the people around them and possible remedies for such problems. The comment sections were analyzed using the KJ method. The workers said they wanted more time to engage in conversations and small talk with employees around them on a daily basis and Company Z to remove more information barriers. The importance of conversation and small talk between workers has been pointed out in network and sociolinguistic studies. In the previous paper, we discussed how the job satisfaction and personal relationships of the DHH employees was positively correlated when they were able to talk not only about work but also about personal matters. Based on this information we proposed to Company Z that DHH employees be given the opportunity to be directly involved in the creation of Company Z's disability policy, and that hearing employees be provided with information on different communication strategies and training to communicate not using regular spoken Japanese.本研究は、広島大学女性研究者特定共同研究助成の成果である