Dr. Bob McCormack (St. Michael’s House) & Siobhan Buckley (Prosper Fingal) – Project Managers
Reported:
St. Michael’s House / Prosper Fingal Report
Keywords: Rights • Learning Disability • Personal Outcome Measures
The project is a listening exercise, an attempt to understand how people with disabilities understand their human rights. It is uncovering the foundations on which we must build a right-based culture. We hope that this project will help in the development of materials and approaches that enable people to better understand and exercise their rights while respecting the rights of others.
The purpose of the research was to answer the question: What is the participants’ understanding of their fundamental human rights and how can we help them have a better awareness and understanding of their rights and responsibilities? The research was essentially a listening project, exploratory in nature, and so used qualitative methodologies to address the research question.
Six centres were selected as representative of adults with low support needs in the two agencies involved. The centres each supported between 52 and 72 people with “moderate or mild” learning disabilities, a total of 368 people in all. The methodology involved five stages: Information meetings; Discussion groups; One-to-one interviews; Preliminary feedback and discussion sessions; Dissemination was undertaken in a number of ways. The main analysis focused on the 69 completed one-to-one interviews.