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Sample 1
8 Pages - Psychology


RESILIENCE AND QUALITY OF LIFE IN PEOPLE WITH MOTOR DISABILITIES

PROBLEM STATEMENT

According to the WHO, there are more than 1,000 million people with some type of disability around the world. The multilateral organization has expressed its concern, because the world population is aging, which leads to a greater risk of disability, due to the prevalence in the appearance of some related disease or as a consequence of pathologies such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases or of mental health. Of this population, it is estimated that some 200 million present some important impediment in their functioning.

Due to this growing problem, the WHO, together with the World Bank, issued in 2011 the World Report on Disability that collects, codifies and classifies a series of data that can be used by governments, civil society organizations and the same people affected in each country, in the design and implementation of new policies to serve this segment of the population.

For the case: The National Household Survey for 2009 showed that 35% of the population estimated at 30 million people lived in poverty, while 12% were in extreme poverty at that time. This panorama makes the need for the adoption of care policies that favor people with motor difficulties even more imminent, since a population that cannot attend to their basic needs can hardly face the challenges associated with motor disability.

In a report presented in 2012, the entity estimated the number of people with some type of disability at 1,575,000. This is equivalent to 5.2% of the total population. More than half of them, 52.1% are women and 47.9% are men.

On the other hand, and as a second variable, resilience is the ability of human beings to adapt to the adverse circumstances of life in order to overcome the obstacles that arise along the way. The resilience approach associated as a public health variable is relatively new after evolving conceptually from an innate condition of the human being, as it was treated until the sixties, to a phenomenon in which elements of a multifactorial nature intervene that end up modeling the behavior of each individual within a society.

For some authors, the phenomenon of resilience is not a human condition or a characteristic, but is part of a process that makes certain people experience individual development with a certain normality and to a certain degree of harmony despite being in an unfavorable environment and socioculturally depressed or having survived conflictive situations since childhood such as abandonment, physical abuse, famine, violation of the right to education, among others. This would imply that resilience would be generated not by a characteristic of certain people or a virtue, but a behavior learned under totally adverse conditions.

Resilience

The notion of Resilience has been used for a long time by Physics and Engineering, one of its precursors being the English scientist Thomas Young, who, in 1807, considering tension and compression, first introduced the notion of modulus of elasticity. Young described experiments on tension and compression of bars, looking for the relationship between the force that was applied on a body and the deformation that this force produced. This scientist was also a pioneer in the analysis of stresses caused by impact, having devised a method for calculating these forces.

Resilience refers to the ability of a material to absorb energy without undergoing permanent or plastic deformation. In materials, therefore, the modulus of resilience can be obtained in the laboratory through successive measurements or by using a mathematical formula that relates stress and strain and accurately provides the resilience of the materials. It is important to note that different materials have different modulus of resilience.

Resilience is the capacity of the individual to face problems, adapt to change, overcome obstacles and resist the pressure of adverse situations – shock, stress, some type of traumatic event, among others. Without entering a psychological, emotional or physical outbreak, finding strategic solutions to face and overcome adversity. In organizations, resilience is about making a decision when someone is faced with a context between the stress of the environment and the will to win. These decisions provide strategic forces in the person to face adversity.

Maintaining mental immunity is the foundation for creating emotional resilience. The individual conditions the mind to tolerate terrifying thoughts and manages to avoid suffering when he realizes that pain will inevitably be part of the life path.

The factors inherent to resilience are:

Managing emotions

It is the ability to remain calm in a stressful situation. People resilient to this factor can use the clues they read in other people to reorient behavior, promoting self-regulation. When this skill is rudimentary, people have difficulty cultivating bonds and often emotionally drain those with whom they live in family or at work.

Pulse control

It is the ability to regulate the intensity of your impulses in the neuromuscular system (nerves and muscles), not to get carried away impulsively by the experience of an emotion. People can exert loose or rigid control of their muscular system, since this system is linked to the regulation of the intensity of emotions. In this way, the person may experience an emotion in an exacerbated or inhibited way. Impulse control guarantees self-regulation of these emotions or the possibility of giving due force to the experience of emotions, making the author’s degree of understanding more sensitive and refined according to the situation.

Optimism

It is the belief that things can change for the better. There is a continuous reversal of hope and, therefore, the conviction of the ability to control the destiny of life, even when the power of decision is out of hand. Optimism is combined with social competence and proactivity, based on self-efficacy

Environmental analysis

It is the ability to accurately identify the causes of problems and adversities present in the environment. This possibility allows the person to put themselves in a safer place instead of taking risks.

Empathy

It is the ability of the human being to understand the psychological states of others (emotions and feelings). It is not about “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” as many people insist. Rather, it is the ability to feel the same as the other feels, while “putting oneself in someone’s shoes” in a certain way contributes to the experience and direction of understanding actions.

Self-efficacy

It is the belief in the ability to organize and execute the actions necessary to produce the desired results. Associated with self-confidence, it becomes a “fuel” for proactivity and problem solving.

Reach the people

It is the ability of the person to bond with other people to allow solutions to the elements of life, without fear or fear of failure.

 

Beginning in the 2000s, the ‘resilient approach’ emerged, which underlies the determining belief models

In order to broaden the understanding of resilience, basic belief schemes linked to the strategic overcoming of stress were mapped: these are the determining belief models (DCM). This development, known as QUES, allows mapping and understanding the type of improvement of a person or a group in situations of adversity and strong and continuous stress. It is structured with a theoretical approach to cognitive therapy, positive psychology and general systems theory, from a psychosomatic approach.

These DCMs are structured from early childhood. These are beliefs that come together when we come to know / learn / experience the facts of life with those around us. The DCMs are:

Self-control: ability to deal emotionally with the unexpected. It is to mature in the expressed behavior, since it will be this behavior that will be read by other people. It is the condition of serenity in the face of adversity;

Body Reading: ability to read, identify and organize perceived reactions in the body, especially those related to the nervous / muscular system. It is maturing in the way of dealing with the somatic reactions that arise when tension or stress increases;

Optimism About Life: Ability to view life with hope, joy, and dreams. It is the maturity to control the destiny of life, even when the power of decision is out of your hands. Therefore, one of the most precious characteristics for the cultivation of Optimism for Life is creativity;

Environmental analysis: ability to accurately identify and understand the causes, relationships and implications of problems, conflicts and adversities present in the environment. It means realizing and being aware of the situations and circumstances present in the experience of stress;

Empathy: ability to demonstrate the ability, from the understanding of the other, to send messages that promote interaction and rapprochement, connectivity and reciprocity between people;

Self-confidence: ability to be convinced of being capable and effective in the proposed actions;

Reaches and maintains people: ability to bond with other people without fear or fear of failure, connecting to form strong networks of support and protection;

Meaning of life: ability to understand a vital purpose of life in the experience lived as adverse. It promotes the enrichment of the value of life, strengthening and empowering people to preserve their life to the fullest.

Each of the DCM develops resilience in one area of life and the rank of all of them together contemplates the life of a person.

Concept

The resilience of materials is measured by mathematical formulas, and questions about how to operate when the matter is human. He points out that the study of the phenomenon of resilience is recent in the humanities. It has been researched for some thirty years, but only in recent years have international congresses discussed this construct.

In several countries in Europe, the United States and Canada, the term resilience has been used in a common way, even being incorporated by the population, to the point that it is already part of the colloquial vocabulary. It should be noted that this popularization may have a price, since at certain times frequent use leads to distortions of the true meaning of the word, a fact observed by the Canadian researcher Martineau (1999), in her PhD thesis on resilience, in which she highlighted the term “Reification”, as it serves to designate people or things that resist and cause changes.

The literature shows that resilience initially referred to personality traits, and that although context and relationship networks were later considered as protective factors, it focused on healthy individual development in difficult conditions, in the family environment or in situations environmental, such as wars, immigration, social problems, among others.

The studies began with research on overcoming diseases, then focused more on children and adolescents of preschool age, with the concern of knowing how this child or adolescent overcame the challenges imposed by family, school and urban coexistence. Meanwhile, adults and the elderly appeared as survivors of the catastrophes of war and migratory movements, and later, as caregivers of relatives.

At first, resilience was viewed as a biologically inherited trait or set of personality traits that supposedly rendered the child who possessed them invulnerable. These individual traits included an easy temperament, a higher level of intelligence, a higher level of self-esteem, and a realistic sense of hope and personal control. People with this privilege were identified among those who, despite having experienced high degrees of stress, did not become ill.

Such personality traits were understood to mediate physiological processes and allow some stressed people to remain healthy. In reality, it was a limiting view, as it restricted qualities to genetic inheritance and offered an additional parameter of distinction between qualified and disabled children.

The authors use a metaphor, saying that the stress / pressure relationship with non-permanent deformation of the material would correspond to the risk / stress / adverse experience relationship with the final adaptation / adjustment responses in the individual, which still seems quite problematic, considering the difficulties in clarifying what is considered risk and adversity, as well as adaptation and adjustment.

Resilience translates into a set of interconnected phenomena that unfold, throughout life, in an affective, social and cultural context, which can be metaphorically compared to the art of sailing. Storm. It is, therefore, a story that is constructed, daily, from the beginning of life, with each action, with each word, in a long process that is inscribed in a specific context and is collectively rebuilt, over time. , in which the environment and everything that composes it are co-authors.

The reality in which the subject lives can be threatening, compromising the quality of his life and making him suffer, but he manages to find resources that help him to move on and continue. For this author, resilience refers much more to the evolution and history of a subject, than to himself.

The resilient individual seems to stand out for a precocious and adequately differentiated personality structure, with a greater openness to new experiences, new values and the transformation factors of this same structure, which, despite being well established, being flexible and resistant to change.

Bioecological perspective of human development

The bioecological model proposes the scientific study of human development in context and in time, based on the interaction of four interrelated nuclei: the person, the process, the context and time, investigating the causes and processes that influence development. In the first place, the model considers it essential to define the person whose development is being investigated, their individual, physical and psychological characteristics.

The process stands out as the main mechanism responsible for development, being seen through reciprocal interactions, progressively more complex, of an evolving human being with the people, objects and symbols of its immediate environment.Then, the model proceeds to evaluate the context in which development occurs, the people present and their roles as sources of support. It is analyzed through the interaction of the four environmental levels, which constitutes the ecological environment of the developing individual: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem.

The ecological environment is understood by Bronfenbrenner (1996) as a system of grouped, independent and dynamic structures, ranging from the child’s most intimate contact with the person responsible for their care, to the broader social contexts, such as school, the hostel. , neighborhood and culture, for example. The first level is called microsystem, being related to the effect of proximal, environmental and organic influences that come from within the individual, their physical characteristics, objects and people in the immediate environment, which characterize the face-to-face relationship.

The microsystem and mesosystem represent the structures whose levels of relationship are proximal, their influences are more evident, being fundamental for development processes. Those environments in which the individual does not participate directly, but receives indirect influence, are in his exosystem. Bronfenbrenner (1996) mentions three settings that have the potential to influence children’s development: the parents’ workplace, their social support networks, and the ties between family and community.

The macrosystem, in turn, is the broader system, which encompasses the values, ideologies, lifestyle and organization of social institutions common to a given culture. This set has a high power of determination in the forms of relationship that occur in the previous systems (micro, meso and exosystem). This set of ideologies, beliefs and values are actively internalized by the person and directly influence their behaviors and experiences in their development.

The fourth core is time, which allows to analyze the influence of the changes and continuities that occur throughout life for human development. Thus, the analysis of time must focus on the person in relation to the events of her life, from the closest to the most distant, as great historical events.

Quality of life

The World Health Organization (WHO) defined quality of life as “[…] the perception that the individual has of his position in life in the context of the culture and value system in which he lives and in relationship to your goals, expectations, standards, and concerns.

The search for an instrument to assess QoL from a comprehensive perspective has led the WHO to develop a multicenter project, with a scale within a cross-cultural perspective, to measure QoL in adults. First, the 100-question questionnaire, known as WHOQOL-100, was developed and, due to the need for shorter instruments that require little time to complete, but with satisfactory psychometric characteristics, the WHO Quality of Life Group (WHOQOL-GROUP) developed a shortened version of WHOQOL-bref.

The presence of the term quality of life is easily perceived in the language of contemporary society, joining the popular vocabulary with various forms of connotation. There seems to be a consensus that it is good to talk about quality of life, even without defining exactly what we are talking about.

The understanding of the quality of life deals with numerous fields of human, biological, social, political, economic, medical knowledge, among others, in constant interrelation. As it is a recent research area, it is in the process of affirming limits and concepts; therefore, the definitions of the term are common, but not always consistent. Another semantic problem in relation to quality of life is that their definitions can be both broad, trying to encompass the numerous influencing factors, and restricted, delimiting a specific area.

It is observed that the title affirms that the quality of life depends on individual actions to transform, since it gives the idea that the subject can change their habits and, with it, improve their level of well-being and live better. In addition, it states that well-being and quality of life are synonymous or that at least one interferes with the other.

 

In summary, in a careless reading on the subject, it can be concluded that not all subjects have quality of life, and that it is necessary to strive to obtain it. And that is the main message that is transmitted in the media. This way of understanding the quality of life is very common in commercial environments, food advertisements, residential condominiums, political campaigns, among others. The concept of quality of life, which elevates it as an object to be achieved through the effort of the subject, promotes a race to achieve something that common sense knows to be good, but its conceptual limits and semantic scope are not clear. It is as if it were an ideal of contemporaneity, which is expressed in politics, in economics, in personal life.

Quality of life, in many circumstances, has become a useful slang for easy promises and misleading ads. This is due to the lack of specific understanding of the term, and its consequent colonization by the commercial and communication media, which use it as a justification to make their products useful or manipulate public opinion.

Concluding the analysis of this report, it is necessary to highlight another relationship present in common sense in terms of the definition of quality of life: its link with health and physical activity. Perhaps this is the main association between the subject studied and one of its elements, having deeply rooted myths and beliefs in contemporary society.

In the approaches to quality of life, it is necessary to pay attention to the multiplicity of issues that surround this universe, from social to health or economic parameters. These indicators can be analyzed (and they are) by different areas of knowledge, with different references and procedures, with different definitions and related concepts.

The quality of life is not limited to the objective conditions available to individuals, nor to the length of life they may have, but to the meaning they give to these conditions and the way they live. In this conception, the perception of quality of life is variable in relation to groups or subjects. For this author, the term is related to the meaning we give to the objective conditions of life.

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