Living and Aging with a Developmental Disability: Perspectives of Individuals, Family Members and Service Providers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adults with developmental disabilities are living longer, living in the community, and participating more in society. However, little is known about their day-to-day "lived" experiences and overall quality of life. Using a qualitative research approach, three pilot studies were conducted in two urban centres in Ontario to explore this issue from three perspectives: adults with developmental disabilities, family members, and service providers. Forty-eight volunteers participated in individual interviews or focus group sessions. Preliminary transcript analysis reveals several common underlying themes: social relationships, autonomy, overall life satisfaction, positive changes, health and aging, role of religion, societal attitudes, concerns for the future, and meaningful activity. Important differences existed, however, across the three perspectives. Implications for policy, service delivery and future research are discussed. Throughout most of the twentieth century, families were advised to place their children who were born with developmental disabilities in institutions. There was no expectation that they would survive into adulthood, let alone leave the institution or grow old (Grant, 1986; Jones, 1992). Today, however, it is clear that more individuals with developmental disabilities are living longer, living in the community, and participating more actively in all aspects of society. In the last thirty years, the move away from institutional care to community living, along with improved nutrition and health care, has led to an increased life expectancy and thus a growing number of older adults with developmental disabilities (Delorme, 1999; Groeneweg, 1992;
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".