A case study on the quality of life of bakers with mild mental retardation

• Main Author: Lin, En-Kuang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2005
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/3263
• Institution: De La Salle University

This study seeks to describe the quality of life of four bakers with mild mental retardation using the scales and indicators formulated by Dr. Robert Cummins (1997), namely, material well-being, health, productivity, intimacy, safety, place in community, and emotional well-being. It also sought to describe the subjective quality of life of each of the four bakers in terms of importance and satisfaction felt about each of the above domains. And finally, it sought to describe bakers’ level of satisfaction with their quality of life compared with that of Filipinos in general. The study utilized primarily the Quality-of-Life Scale (Intellectual / Cognitive Disability) constructed Cummins (1997). Home visits were conducted as well as interviews to the parents or siblings of the participants using the McLoughlin and Lweis (1994) case history format. To clarify on some vague and conflicting information, a follow-up interview to the bakers was conducted. The findings revealed that the bakers generally perceive themselves as healthy, safe, and relatively productive. In the Objective Scale, they attributed higher ratings on domains of Health, Safety, and Productivity. Lower ratings were attributed to domains of material well-being, intimacy, place in community, and emotional wellbeing. Furthermore, the bakers seem to perceive some negative attitudes of the people towards them. For this reason, they have given low evaluation to the domains of personal relationship and closeness to community. The study also revealed that although the intimacy domain is rated low, which may indicate impaired social relations, the bakers generally consider almost all the domains important. Moreover, even if the domain on Intimacy is considered low important, all bakers feel satisfied with this domain including place in community because intimacy and place in community are domains that are distal from self. Therefore, these bakers put these domains on the abstract level. People tend to feel generally satisfied with factors that are abstract and non-specific. Compared with the Philippine normative data on Personal Well-Being, the mean value of the four bakers satisfaction index is higher than the Philippine norm (R = 55%).