Teachers’ Perception on Personality Traits and Social skills Development of Persons with Disabilities

Abstract

Persons with Disabilities have problem with the development of appropriate social skills. However, social skill is essential to initiate and maintain positive social relationship among all. Previous studies focused largely on enhancing other skills areas among persons with Disabilities while functional skills development is not well researched. This study therefore, investigated Teachers’ perspectives on personality traits and social skills development among persons with Disabilities in Ibadan. Bandura’s social learning theory formed the bases and framework for the study. Four schools were purposively selected for the study. Forty (40) persons with various fiorms of disabilities were the respondents. The instruments used were Pupils Social Development Checklist (r=0.80), Neuroticism Scale for Children (0.73) and Personality Inventory for Children (Extroversion) (0.73) Scales. Data were analyzed using the descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviations at 0.05 level of significance. There is a significant positive relationship between the social skills development of persons with disabilities and extraversion (r=.368, p (.019) <.05), but there was no significant relationship between social skills development of persons with disabilities and neuroticism (r=-.141, p (.386)>.05) respectively. It was therefore concluded that persons with disabilities are predisposed to display unacceptable social characteristics as a result of peculiar personality traits of an individual persons. It was therefore recommended that teachers and care givers of persons with disabilities should note and pay attention to the fact that most people behave the way they do simply because of their peculiar personality trait as there are significant impact of personality traits on social skills development.