Abstract
Recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2020b) indicate that 61 million people in the United States have some sort of disability. Additionally, research from the National Department of Education Statistics (2021) indicates that the number of disabled undergraduate college students continues to rise as 19 percent of all enrolled undergraduate students in the 2015-2016 school year reported having a disability. While this research further indicates that disabled college students face a number of on-campus access and participatory challenges, it fails to consider that disabled college students may also face inconsistencies in their disability identities that, based on prior Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) research, might impact, or be impacted by, their communication satisfaction, communication apprehension, and communication competence. However, as there is a lack of research, specifically CTI research, on disability identity gaps and communication, the current study sought to fill this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between three disability identity gaps, the disability personal-relational identity gap, the disability personal-enacted identity gap, and the disability personal-communal identity gap, and three communication variables, communication satisfaction, communication apprehension, and communication competence. After administering a cross-sectional survey to a total of 223 university students, 30 being disabled and 193 being non-disabled, there were two significant findings. First, communication competence predicted the disability personal-enacted identity gap. In other words, the more communication competence disabled college students possessed, the less gaps they faced in their disability personal-enacted identities. Second, the disability personal-enacted identity gap predicted communication satisfaction. In other words, the more disability identity gaps disabled college students experienced, the less satisfied they were with their communication. As such, these findings suggest that a disabled individual’s ability to perform and enact accurate depictions of their disability identity, and in turn be satisfied with the communication they experience, rests upon how competent they are in behaving in ways that reinforce this identity.