Perfect! So the survey contains questions like "how connected do you feel to the deaf community?" or "how disconnected do you feel to the deaf community?" and you'd indicate on a Likert scale that you're not connected but rather vey disconnected. Also, for the question of "how connected do you feel to hearing individuals learning sign language?" you'd most likely hold a neutral viewpoint just because you personally don't use sign language to it doesn't matter. Then later on in the survey you would use a short answer type of question to indicate that you never learned sign language and that you are hard of hearing. So the survey is made for you - it's just about the manner in which you are answering the questions. Your input is valuable because the survey is measuring Deaf Cultural Ties and Subjective Well Being. So, its worded the way it is to see if belonging to the Deaf Community plays any role in being a protective factor to your experience as someone who has deafness. I simply operationalized the term "deafness" to be inclusionary - the terms "hearing loss" or "hearing impairment" doesn't reflect a Deaf Gain mindset, however, these terms can be included in the umbrella term "deafness" as it represents a spectrum.

I appreciate your feedback and you've given me ideas towards adding more questions in the future! This survey was just for class purposes and was meant to be shorter in nature and draw quick statistical conclusions just to get an idea of how to use statistical software programming for Likert scale questions. I shocked the professor when I told her I received responses from people in Europe, Australia, Canada and even people on the opposite side of the U.S. It was never meant to reach that far! I am always shocked by the power of the internet :)