SOCIAL WORK WITH DIFFERENT TYPES OF FAMILY REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT CHILDRENS’ DISABILITY

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the research of family representations about childrens’ disabilities. Nowadays, special attention is paid to the targeted social services development and implementation that will correspond to the needs and demands of a certain client group. The relevance of the research is identifying different types of family representations will help to classify families with children with disabilities according to their attitudes towards social change and, accordingly, improve the quality of provided social services. The purpose of the article is to study the characteristics of family representations about childrens’ disabilities and determine their impact on the process of providing social services to families. The method or semantic differential was used to study the content of different types of family representations, which included the study of the attitudes towards childhood illness, disability status, and family. The observation was used to study the characteristics of family behavior in the process of providing social services. The result of the research there were found four types of family representations: «sacrificial», «compensatory», «perspective» and «adaptive». The first type considers himself as a victim of circumstances and tries to attract specialists to his problems, however does not want to take responsibility for it. The second type tries to compensate for all the restrictions, which were caused by disability, and joined all the activities. The third type of representations percepts disability as a normal characteristic of personality, trying to cope with life challenges. The fourth type of representation is highly adapted, though all the restrictions are perceived as a normal thing, which does not cause any problems. Families with each type of representation have different types of interaction with the social worker and act differently during social events.