Engaging in Difficult Conversations: Supporting the Spiritual Needs of People with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article joins the existing conversation about the place and importance of spirituality for persons with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD). While the conversation is marginal and predominantly informed by US-based studies, we present findings from a study based in Metro Vancouver, Canada that continues a decade of research by three local community living organizations, which discovered an egregious lack of attention to supporting the inner needs of human life and wellbeing. With an understanding that spirituality is largely omitted from discussions of wellbeing but can be a powerful component of human life, we explored how “spiritual literacy”—described as an ability to engage with religious and nonreligious spiritualities in our study—can further support well-being for adults with IDD. Specifically, we examined staff and management perspectives concerning their role in supporting the spiritual literacy and journeys of persons with IDD. Through a survey across the three organizations; sense-making sessions with frontline staff, managers, CEOs, and board members; and, co-analysis with staff to further analyze the data, we learned that: 1) everyone defines “spirituality” differently which makes an organizational strategy difficult to devise; 2) staff lack training around religion and spirituality and feel ill-equipped to provide literacy or guidance; and, 3) clear guidelines are needed to navigate ethical dilemmas. We discuss each finding in this article and offer practical implications for agencies. While it provides findings from stage one of our project, another article will present findings from conversations with adults with IDD to provide further insight into this discussion.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".