Project Description:
Background
Parallel conversations led to the identification of shared interests among Drs. Karrie Shogren and Mike Wehmeyer (University of Kansas) and Dr. Ryan Niemiec and Neal Mayerson (VIA Institute on Character and the Mayerson Family Foundation) around promoting access to measures of strengths, such as the VIA Survey, for youth with intellectual and development disabilities. The VIA Survey and the VIA Youth Survey are scientifically validated assessments of character strengths that have been used by individuals across the world to identify their strengths. However, the VIA Survey and the VIA Youth Survey have never been validated with youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Shogren, Wehmeyer, and other leaders in the disability field have begun to emphasize the importance of identifying and adopting strengths-based approaches to supporting people with intellectual disability. The recently published, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Disability (Wehmeyer, 2013), was the first text that brought together issues related to disability and positive psychology. A chapter in the text (Shogren, 2013) emphasized the application of positive psychology to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, highlighting how changes in the field have led toward strengths-based models of supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to achieve valued outcomes. The chapter also highlighted the need for assessments and models of support planning that address strengths.
Proposal
In addition to measures of support needs and positive psychology constructs, such as self-determination, there is a need for broader measures of character strengths in the intellectual and developmental disability field. Such tools could facilitate an emerging focus on supporting the development of character strengths, strengths-based support planning, and matching strengths to targeted post-school outcomes for employment, community participation, and further education. We propose that, in conjunction with our other projects, primarily the Self-Determination Assessment project, we concurrently validate the VIA Youth Survey with the subsample of youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities included in the Self-Determination Assessment project. Essentially, by leveraging our ongoing work and connections to the schools, we can go through a systematic process of reviewing the VIA Youth Survey items, determining any needed adjustments for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities, making these adjustments, field testing the revised items, and then validating the tool with a large sample. This creates a win-win for all parties because much of the infrastructure and support for validating the VIA Youth Survey for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities is already in place through existing projects, and will lead to two high quality tools validated for this population.
