Kateřina HOLUBOVÁ

PhD study

Specialization: special education, psychology

Oral examination in English

2004-05-07

The semantic-choice test –

a way into families with handicapped children

Starting points of a PhD thesis

Mgr. Martina Švandová

PhD student – grade 1

2004-05-02

Introduction

Social changes of recent years cause us to break the tabuization of handicapped persons. Many special organizations were founded for them after the Velvet revolution. One of basic credos of good organizations or institutions is the support of families, who bring handicapped children up.

I am interested in the psychological part of special services for those families, because I work as a psychologist in a day care center for preschool disabled children, which provides care, treatment, rehabilitation and educational programs. We have been working as a mixed-profession team for the last 10 years. As a result of this, we have had the opportunity to develop a way to individualise the care and to redefine the right sense of the psychological and pedagogical diagnosis: to concentrate on current and potencial abilities and skills at the expense of insufficiencies. We have changed our conception of the psychological care from an individual person to a family.

From this point of view we try to find new psychological techniques which are suitable for family-diagnostics. These efforts have motivated me for my PhD-thesis research.

Starting points and goals

First of all, my interest is concentrated on mothers of handicapped children, because their personality is undoubtedly infuenced by living together with children with specific problems and needs. The problem is that attitudes of those mothers often are not fully conscious. For that reason I have set myself the main goals:

to suggest a psychodiagnostic method, which can help to reveal some unconscious emotional-dynamics-aspects of mothers of children afflicted with chronic disease or disability

to realize a small psychological research to verify the sensibility of the method: to find out, if the technique chosen for that purpose can uncover some intrapsychical conflicts

to make suggestion of psychotherapeutic process: how to use results of the research in family-psychotherapy .

Research problem

The main criterion for making mothers-selection to have a relatively homogenous studied group is the age of a child and the time when a disease was recognized. I have found out, that the most suitable rulls for the selection are:

mothers have handicapped children 3-7 years old (preschool children)

mothers have been fully informed about their children diagnosis at least for one year (they have probably got over the early troubles: an early shock and a refutation of the truth).

A control group will contain mothers, who have 3-7 years old healthy children.

The main criterions to choose the most optimal diagnostic technique are:

a psychological test with a standardization, which has been published in CR

a method for the personality-diagnostics

a method which is not a kind of a questonnaire because of the risk of answers--simulations

a method which is not projektive, because those techniques are very complicated and their interpretation is very difficult.

I have chosen The semantic-choice test according to these criterions, where examined persons work with symbols (for instance Sun, Cross, Tree, Fish, Snake). The administration of the test is quite easy. Persons can express their attitudes to primary life-values (for instance Love, Job, Pain, Faith, Doctor, Children), but they do not exactly know, what they do – they answers are not fully controlled by their consciousness. Then the examinator can find out, which values or fundamental concepts have positive, negative, indifferent or ambivalent “shade” according to the certain person.

Basic questions for the formulation of a zero-hypothesis

Are attitudes of mothers of handicapped children to primary life-values significantly different then attitudes of mothers of healthy children?

Is The semantic-choice test an adequately sensitive method how to reveal these possible differences?

Conclusion

If an influence of living together with a handicapped child on its mother’s attitudes is significantly proved, I will try to choose one of the families for follow-up meetings to continue with a psychological work with the test to racionalize and to bring the conscious control over some uncouscious tendencies.

My general aim is to support the systematic approach to the planning of psychotherapeutic strategies.