BELIEVABILITY AND IMPORTANCE AS DETERMINANTS OF RUMOR AMONG DEAF COLLEGE-STUDENTS

In an attempt to develop a ''psychology of rumor'' among the Deaf, equ ivalent in scope to what is already known about rumor among hearing po pulations, one of the main goals of this research was to address the r oles of believability and importance in a sample of young adult colleg e students. Believability and importance emerged as significant variab les in rumor among Deaf college students. Importance of the rumor topi c related to both extent of specific rumor knowledge and to extent of transmission rates of specific rumors. Subjects with more knowledge ab out a rumor viewed it as more important as did subjects who transmitte d a rumor more frequently. Believability also was related to transmiss ion rates. Subjects who transmitted a rumor more frequently also belie ved it more than did infrequent transmitters. Subjects who knew more a bout a rumor were also more anxious and more extroverted than their le ss knowledgeable counterparts. Frequent transmitters were also more an xious than infrequent transmitters. Multivariate analyses indicated th at the best predictors of rumor knowledge were generalized anxiety, ex troversion and gender. The best predictors of transmission rates were importance and generalized anxiety.