A Study On The Present Situation And Strategies About Quality Of Life Of Students With Intellectual Disabilities In Wuhan

Quality of life refers to the individual's overall perception of their own lives, and their positive feelings about the interaction with the surrounding environment,the interpersonal relationship, and opportunities.It is made up of objective quality of life and subjective quality of life. Quality of life has been studied for long, but it was embraced by the intellectual disability field until the 1980s. Reasons were as follows: first, people changed their views about people with disabilities; second, the movement of "normalization","deinstitutionalization" and "return to the mainstream" only focused on the process without paying attention to the outcomes; third, the "quality revolution" which put emphasis on quality products, quality results got rapid development.So far, international researchers have gained great achievement in studies on quality of life. In this context, studies in China has also increased significantly in the recent years, mainly focusing on the introduction and discussion about the concept and the cross-culture measurement. Moreover, these studies mainly paid attention to the older individuals with intellectual disabilities in the community and institutions, while little to relatively young students in the special schools.This study first reviewed, translated and classified the related national and international literature on the quality of life of intellectual disabilities, which includes the development of quality of life of intellectual disabilities, the concept, the content, the measurement of quality of life, aiming to provide a theoretical basis and possible research plans for the study. And then selected 51 students of two schools for intellectual disabilities in Wuhan, using the documentary study, interviews and survey methods to investigate the present situation about the quality of life of students with intellectual disabilities in Wuhan and the influencing factors so that they will be provided better living skills and their quality of life will be improved.The results were as follows:first, students with intellectual disabilities were having a poor quality of life level, with the relatively better satisfaction levels; second, the internal factors, such as gender, grade, whether to participate in additional training, physical health, affected their quality of life level. Third, the family factors, such as the educational level and occupation of parents, family structure, only child or not, and family income also affected their quality of life level.According to the study results, this paper proposed three suggestions:first, from the perspective of the society, the community should play an important role and people should pay more attention to single-parent families of intellectual disabilities;second, from the perspective of school education, the curriculum should be closer to real life of students with intellectual disabilities and the health status of them should be emphasized; third, from the perspective of families, the parents should actively take part in the education of students with intellectual disabilities and teach their children according to the family characteristics in order to improve the quality of life of their children.