Mental Handicap

Aim  This paper seeks to illumine how families with children and adult members with intellectual disabilities manage to manifest a buoyant and durable capacity over time. It is therefore concerned centrally with the idea of resilience.Method  Drawing from diverse theoretical literatures from child development and protection and gerontology, the paper begins with a review of constructions of resilience. In an attempt to assess where there seems to be support for resilience in families, the core of the paper tests empirical evidence about positive experiences of families supporting children and adults with intellectual disabilities against the theoretical literature on resilience.Result and Conclusions  The findings are used to suggest conditions under which resilience is produced and maintained, and to identify emergent elements of a psycho-social model of resilience in families with children and adult members with intellectual disabilities.

... Rachel Forrester-Jones 1 ,; John Carpenter 2 ,; Pauline Coolen-Schrijner 3 ,; Paul Cambridge 1 ,; Alison Tate 2 ,; Jennifer Beecham 4 ,; Angela Hallam 4 ,; ... Many studies (eg Emerson & Hatton 1996; Rapley & Beyer 1998; Stancliffe & Lakin 1999, Robertson et al. ...

Background  Early intervention services adopting a family-centred approach are considered important for ensuring parent satisfaction. This study investigated the satisfaction of two mothers with an early intervention programme for young children with autistic spectrum disorder.Materials and Methods  While 16 mother–child dyads participated in a larger study, two mothers who reported considerably lower satisfaction with the programme than the rest of the mothers were the focus of this paper. Using descriptive case studies, various child, parent and service delivery factors that may have influenced satisfaction are described.Results  Child and parent factors that may have lessened satisfaction for these two mothers included the child’s lack of improvement, child’s goal performance post-intervention, parenting stress and decreased parenting competence. Both mothers also had decreased perceptions of the family-centredness of the service and expressed difficulties with establishing collaborative partnerships.Conclusion  This paper proposes that parental satisfaction may be influenced by numerous factors relating to the child, parent and service. Relationships with service providers appear to be particularly important.

This paper reports follow-up data on an earlier evaluative study (Rapley & Beyer, 1996) of a small community-based dispersed housing service. With the concept of Quality of Life (QOL) becoming established in the literature as an appropriate outcome measure of service practice, the previous study reported the use of the Schalock & Keith (1993) Quality of Life Questionnaire (QOL.Q) as an adjunct to established evaluative measures of service quality. Rapley & Beyer (1996) concluded that measures such as the QOL.Q may offer a useful addition to the evaluative armoury. This study reports service outcome data collected in the same network after a 2-year interval. A positive change in measured quality of life was observed. Overall levels of engagement were static over time. Small positive changes in levels of socially integrative and domestic activities did not reach statistical significance. Changes in QOL.Q scores were consistent with the observed changes in the detail of community and domestic participation.

... Rachel Forrester-Jones 1 ,; John Carpenter 2 ,; Pauline Coolen-Schrijner 3 ,; Paul Cambridge 1 ,; Alison Tate 2 ,; Jennifer Beecham 4 ,; Angela Hallam 4 ,; ... Many studies (eg Emerson & Hatton 1996; Rapley & Beyer 1998; Stancliffe & Lakin 1999, Robertson et al. ...

... 1 The majority of the 1000 residents of these facilities are age 55 years or older (Livingston 2004) and many have more severe disabilities. ... Shaun Cleaver was supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a Graduate Studentship Award from SEO CURA in ID. ...

Background  For families of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) getting a diagnosis is a traumatic experience on which future care and education plans for the child depend. In this paper parental experiences of diagnosis and forward planning for children with ASD are reported.Method  This paper is part of a large cross-sectional study conducted in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that assessed the needs and experiences of parents of children diagnosed with ASD. Questionnaires were designed and completed by 95 parents, reporting on 100 children, as well as 67 multi-disciplinary professionals.Results  Findings confirm that diagnostic and planning processes are extremely stressful for parents, that statutory diagnosis takes a long time, that care and education plans do not include full parental participation, and that reviews of plans do not consistently include intervention data.Conclusion  Policy and practice implications of these findings are important for future revisions of diagnostic tools and manuals.

... Noelia Flores*, Cristina Jenaro*, M. Begon˜a Orgaz| and M. Victoria Martın* *INICO (Instituto Universitario de Integración en ... in the workplace (Chadsey & Beyer 2001; Farris & Stanc-liffe 2001 ... As an additional step forward, in order to help under-stand the impact of predictors on ...

Background  Self-injurious behaviour (SIB) is among the most serious problems faced by intellectual disability services. It is very difficult to treat and can become a chronic problem.Method  Information on a number of variables was collected through a survey of service-users identified as displaying SIBs. Clinical opinion and a literature review guided the selection of potential predictors of continued SIB. Univariate statistical analyses were used to investigate associations between continued SIB and each of the variables identified. Variables shown to have a significant association with continued SIB were subjected to a multivariate analysis to isolate those variables that still predicted continued SIB once the influence of the others had been accounted for.Results  Two factors, self-biting and verbal ability, were found to independently predict continued SIB.Conclusion  The results have implications for intellectual disability services, in terms of the importance of multidisciplinary team working, training and guidelines for problem management.

Background Policy objectives for people with intellectual disabilities include day service modernization and the promotion of paid employment and quality of life. Quality of life is under represented as an outcome measure in vocational research. This research compares subjective and objective quality of life, and quality of work environment for adults with intellectual disabilities in supported employment, employment enterprises and day services with non-disabled workers in community employment. Methods Comprehensive Quality of ...

... To quote an example of understanding cues, a pdb from India noted 'while in temple, when pooja/aarthi (a ritual during prayer in ... of play development in children and its role in the development of children with disabilities including the development of creativity (Narayan & Riggio ...

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Background The sexual lives of people with intellectual disability is made complex by the involvement and influence of social service providers, whose beliefs and values have a great impact on the support they provide. We hypothesized that social service providers' ...

ABSTRACT This paper describes an attempt to evaluate quality of life using standards set by the local community. Several parameters derived from community psychology, such as actual levels of functioning and degree of satisfaction within several life domains, are used ...

... see, interpret and negatively judge any signs of anxiety ('they will see I'm worried and think it is a further sign of my incompetence'). The Clark and Wells' model assumes that socially anxious people put significant effort into monitoring their self-representation in social situations. ...

A group of eight adults with moderate to mild mental handicaps (tutors) were taught ways of promoting communication in eleven of their less able peers (students). They encouraged the students to communicate by means of combined signed and spoken utterances in naturalistic settings. As well as showing significant increases in their pre- and post-intervention vocabularies, the students showed significant increases in the extent to which they responded to tutors' interactions with them.

Background  Policy objectives for people with intellectual disabilities include day service modernization and the promotion of paid employment and quality of life. Quality of life is under represented as an outcome measure in vocational research. This research compares subjective and objective quality of life, and quality of work environment for adults with intellectual disabilities in supported employment, employment enterprises and day services with non-disabled workers in community employment.Methods  Comprehensive Quality of Life Scale, and Work Environment Scale were collected for people with intellectual disabilities: 17 supported employees; 10 employment enterprise workers; 10 day service attendees; and 17 non-disabled work colleagues of supported employees.Results  Supported employees reported higher objective quality of life than employment enterprise workers and day service attendees. Non-disabled co-workers reported higher objective quality of life and autonomy at work than the three groups of people with intellectual disabilities. Supported employees reported higher subjective quality of life than non-disabled co-workers.Conclusions  The findings support the utility of supported employment as a means to provide constructive occupation and enhanced quality of life to people with intellectual disabilities. However, closing the gap with respect to non-disabled co-workers on objective quality of life measures represents a challenge and will require improving the quality of job finding and workplace support and the training provided.

Background  Self-injurious behaviour (SIB) is among the most serious problems faced by intellectual disability services. It is very difficult to treat and can become a chronic problem.Method  Information on a number of variables was collected through a survey of service-users identified as displaying SIBs. Clinical opinion and a literature review guided the selection of potential predictors of continued SIB. Univariate statistical analyses were used to investigate associations between continued SIB and each of the variables identified. Variables shown to have a significant association with continued SIB were subjected to a multivariate analysis to isolate those variables that still predicted continued SIB once the influence of the others had been accounted for.Results  Two factors, self-biting and verbal ability, were found to independently predict continued SIB.Conclusion  The results have implications for intellectual disability services, in terms of the importance of multidisciplinary team working, training and guidelines for problem management.