A Study On The Self-Determination Of Young People With Intellectual Disabilities

Promoting disabled people's ability to self-determination is the key factors to lead them to independent living, success in transition, integration into the community and to meet the individual needs to get more respect and confidence. The research on self-determination of disabled persons abroad has a long history, but very few inland. This study attempts to explore the structure and characteristics of self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities systematically, to cross cultural differences, by means of the plentiful research results from foreign countries, and to explore effective way of self-determination theory and practice on the basis of intervention to them in China.The concept of self-determination theory consists of autonomy, self-regulation, psychological empowerment and self-realization, including sixteen elements such as independence, choice-making, decision-making, goal-setting, problem-solving, task execution, self-observation, evaluation and reinforcement, self-advocacy, self-instruction, communication, locus of control, self-efficacy, positive attribution, outcome expectancy, self-awareness and self-knowledge.The study comprises five parts, which the second to the fourth part is empirical research which is interrelation, demonstrates mutually and progression step by step.The first part puts forward the theory ideas of self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities and explains the overall design of this study, by analyzing concepts and its evolution, theoretical model, education and teaching experience and correlational study of self-determination in the disability field at home and abroad.The second part determinates the structure of self-determination for young people with intellectual disabilities, which is made of still four dimensions and sixteen elements adjusted, by qualitative research on environment through semi-structured interviews to parents and teachers of young people with intellectual disabilities, and developing self-report questionnaire of self-determination for young people with intellectual disabilities.The third part studies characteristics of self-determination of the young people with intellectual disabilities:the extremely significant difference on the self-determination of young people with different degrees of intellectual disabilities; the significantly different on the self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities who is one child or not in his/her family; the very significantly different on the self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities who had attended the difference school previous; no significant difference on the self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities who come from different area, by testing questionnaire of self-determination of young people with intellectual disabilities.The fourth part is teaching intervention using a single-subject design to the young people with intellectual disabilities with the two elements of self-determination. The results showed:significant progress achieved by young people with intellectual disabilities by percentage by teaching how to set their own goal and to solve problems, while secondary teaching strategies in order to determine the concept of self-guided learning process, learning content up to 80% on the basis of proficiency.The fifth part is comprehensive discussion and summary to the self-determination of basic research and intervention studies.