Personality Traits as a Mediator Between Hearing Impairment and the Feeling of Loneliness

No research to date has touched upon such three aspects simultaneously: hearing impairment, the feeling of loneliness and personality traits as a mediator of their connection. Since early research showed that there is a connection between feelings of loneliness and personality traits, between personality traits and hearing impairment as well as between hearing impairment and feelings of loneliness, the purpose of this study is to explore all three aspects together. The work used the Differential Loneliness Experience Questionnaire (Osin & Leontiev, 2010), which measures the experience of loneliness on three scales, and the Russian version (Shchebetenko et al., 2020) of the Big Five Inventory-2 (Soto & John, 2017) which examines personality traits. An important implication of the study was to clarify which personality traits of deaf and hard of hearing people can be associated with feelings of loneliness, which people may be more tended to loneliness.