DIS 499/599: Overview: Module 1: Topic 3: Lesson
Week 4: 2/4 - 2/10
To complete this assignment successfully, you should:
1. Read the following lessons on family empowerment, locus of control, dependency and learned helplessness and self-efficacy perception.
2. Respond to these concepts as a part of the Virtual Conference Center (VCC) activity.
EMPOWERMENT
This week we're exploring concepts and terminology of power, that have been used by the professional community in viewing families caring for members with disabilities or other challenges. These concepts can be complex and sometimes misunderstood and misused.
Objectives
* To introduce the concept of empowerment.
* To recognize that empowerment is both a process and an outcome
The Turnbull's have written extensively about family support issues. They define empowerment as a developmental process that occurs over time when someone acts on his/her needs and desires to gain increasing control over one's situation. The article assigned this week by Dempsey and Foreman will further define empowerment and models to support it.
LOCUS OF CONTROL
Objectives
* To introduce the concept of locus of control
* To identify this concept as a factor in perception for families and individuals
* To personalize the concept of individual locus of control
* To analyze the impact of locus of control on family adjustment
Internal control can be defined as a belief that you control life events or their outcomes yourself.
External control can be defined as a belief that life events or their outcomes are controlled by forces outside yourself.
This "construct" was developed by Rotter (1966) and Lefcourt
(1982) and others to refer to internal or external control of reinforcement.
What this means, in other words, is whether or not a person controls the
results of their actions, or whether those things are under control of outside
forces, whether these be other people, "systems", fate, or anything
external to the person. What causes
things to happen?
This is proposed as a
persistent trait of personality; while it can temporarily be influenced by
events and experiences, it forms a person's basic way of interpreting his/her
world, and tends to be fairly constant over time.
Susan Yuan, Ph.D., studied the relationship between locus of control and coping
strategies in parents of children with disabilities who had sleep disorders.
She found a high correlation between internal locus of control and the
number of different strategies a family would try to get their child to sleep.
Interestingly enough, even exhaustion didn't seem to affect this
relationship; the family getting the least sleep also had the most internal
control, and persisted in trying the most strategies to get their son to sleep.
On the other hand, an parent with a high "external" locus of
control, gave up easily trying
to help his son fall asleep, feeling that the situation was beyond his control,
even though the child was actually sleeping a fairly normal number of hours.
Consider what the experience of discovering you are the parent of a child
with a disability would do to your locus of control.
One of the issues in using this model is the question of consistency of
locus of control over time; if it is permanent or stable, then it can be used
to predict how a person will react to a situation.
On the other hand, if it is changeable according to the situation, then
you can often get into circular descriptions of things.
For example, if the "whammy" of fate of having a child born
with a disability causes you to interpret the situation as beyond your control,
then you will try fewer actions to improve the situation, and the whole thing
can spiral downward.
In the Hill (1949), McCubbin & Patterson (1983) models of coping and adjustment, how does locus of control fit into the picture? In the ABCX models of coping and adjustment, locus of control would influence the "C" or "perception" factor of the model, governing the way a person would interpret his or her situation and what he or she would do about it.
DEPENDENCY AND LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
Objectives
* To define, clarify, and correct misuses of terms
* To create awareness of practices that strengthen and weaken family and individual power
How would you define dependency? One definition of dependency might be the belief that you need the help of another person to do something; a lack of confidence in your ability to be effective on your own. In our previous VCC discussions you talked about your reactions to dependency. If necessary to focus on the roles of parents or individuals with disabilities, shift from your personal perspective to theirs to define again define dependency. Maybe you define dependency in very similar terms. The VCC discussion stressed the need to move out of that dependent situation. The discussion also suggested that dependency is a dynamic process that can change and evolve into an interdependent relationship. What was initially thought to be a negative relationship now is a more functional and positive one.
How would you define learned helplessness?
Learned helplessness is a concept developed by Maier and Seligman (1976)
in their study of learning in animals.
A dog was given an electric shock that it could escape by jumping to a
different part of the cage. It
quickly learned to escape the current. Then
the current was distributed, so that it didn't make any difference where the dog
jumped--it had no effect. The
electric shocks came at random. After
several attempts the dog stopped trying to escape the current, and just
"endured" passively. Under
those conditions, dogs and other animals became depressed and developed
psychosomatic disorders. Even when
the original condition was restored, the dog didn't try to jump away, believing
it wouldn't make any difference. In
other words, the animal had learned to be helpless by losing hope in its ability
to have an effect on the situation.
When the term "helplessness" is used in reference to a family, it really is a terrible indictment
of the "system" serving that family, rather than the family itself.
What is being said is that the family has learned over time that nothing
they do will have any effect in making the situation better for themselves or
their child, and thus they have given up and just endure whatever they have to.
This is different from dependency in that with dependency, at least
something positive is happening. The
family doesn't believe that they are making it happen, but there can be some
feeling of hope through the action of others.
With learned helplessness, the lack of effective action has led them to
believe nothing can be done.
SELF-EFFICACY PERCEPTION
Objectives
* To define and clarify the term self-efficacy perception
* To distinguish the situational nature of this concept from more permanent traits of personality* To understand the impact of self-efficacy on the adjustment process for families with children with disabilities
* To identify ways to build self-efficacy perception
Bandura found that self-efficacy perception could be built in four ways:
1)
actually trying something and being successful
2)
watching someone else model successful action
3)
being encouraged by others
4)
by the physiological state a person is experiencing
The most
effective of the strategies is the first. Getting
even partial success builds a person's sense of ability, better than any amount
of persuasion. The second is
effective to the extent that the person believes the "model" to be
similar to him/herself. In other
words, if a person who is very much like you can do it, you probably can too.
According to this theory, this would be the reason for the success of
mentor programs and peer support groups like Parent to Parent.
The third strategy, encouragement, is less effective, but still can be
somewhat successful. It's the old
"you can do it" leading to "I think I can, I think I can" Little
Engine that Could strategy (mental rehearsal, visualization). Research by
Taylor & Brown (1988, 1994) suggests that even the illusion of control can
lead to more effective functioning. The
fourth way, interpretation of physiological sensation, can be illustrated by
having people think about the state of intensity they might experience before an
important speech or a big race. They
could interpret that intensity as "being really psyched up and ready,"
or as being too nervous to perform. The
physical sensations are the same; the interpretation
is the key.
Under what conditions would perceived control cause a person more stress? Bandura has suggested,
1) when decision-making is difficult or ambiguous;
2) when events are actually uncontrollable;
3) when it causes excessive feelings of responsibility, and
4) when control demands a high investment of time, energy, or risk.
According to Bandura, groups can build their sense of efficacy by the same methods, building the belief that together they are capable of achieving results, or also that individual members of the group are able to achieve results.
This lesson were created by Susan Yuan, PhD, for "Family Support, Self-Determination and Disability" and is used here with her permission.
Once you have completed this activity you should:
Go on to Online Reading
or
Go back to Topic 3
Email
the instructor: Becky.Raabe@nau.edu.
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