Abstract
One of the most effective ways of integrating people with disabilities into society and ensuring their comprehensive personal development is to engage people with disabilities into Paralympic Games. Such engagement creates the necessary conditions to socialize people with disabilities, to adapt their physical and mental states to existing living conditions, to ease negative manifestations of their psycho-emotional states, to promote their self-realization. The article presents the results of the research determining the impact of sports on Paralympic athletes’ personal development. The comparison of the indicators of psychological well-being and hardiness of Paralympic athletes with normative values, the indicators shown by students without disabilities and students with disabilities has confirmed proven clear positive influence of sports on Paralympic athletes’ personal development. In particular, Paralympic athletes achieve an optimal level of psychological well-being and a significant increase in all psychological hardiness components.
Highlights
One of the most pressing social problems of nowadays is full integration of people with disabilities into society and their comprehensive personal development
The results obtained by us with the Ryff Scales of Psychological Well-Being show that the main components of psychological well-being of the Paralympic athletes, in general, are close to the normative values
This assumption is supported by the fact that all components of psychological well-being of the Paralympic athletes are significantly higher than those of the students with disabilities not engaged in sports (Table 3)
Summary
One of the most pressing social problems of nowadays is full integration of people with disabilities into society and their comprehensive personal development. The psychological differences between people with disabilities engaged in and not engaged in sports are: the first show higher altruism, willingness to help others, the desire for cooperation, sense of responsibility, well-wishing attitude towards others, self-esteem, independence from opinions of others, self-actualization, sociability, constructivism, purposefulness, self-confidence, life satisfaction and psychosocial adaptation (Campbell, & Jones, 1994; Greenwood, Dzewaltowski, & French, 1990; Maryasova, 2013). They show less symptoms of depression and anxiety (Martin, Malone & Hilyer, 2011). The studies were conducted with the permissions of the teams’ and universities’ management and the personal consent of the participants
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