No abstract

The prevalence of obesity appears greater in people with intellectual disabilities than those in the general population. This study aimed to examine the nutritional intake and anthropometric status of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Participants aged 16-64 years were recruited from intellectual disability service provider organizations ( n = 131). Data were collected using questionnaires; 4-day food dairies and weight, height and waist circumference measurements. Participants' mean body mass index (BMI) was 29.4 kg/m ± 6.1, 2.4% were underweight, 22.6% were normal weight, 28.2% were overweight and 46.8% were obese. Having a diagnosis of Down syndrome ( p = 0.03) was associated with increasing BMI. Increasing waist circumference was associated with increasing severity of ID ( p = 0.04). The mean-reported energy intake was 1890 kcal/day. Mean energy intakes from sugar, fat and saturated fat were above recommendations and few participants met micronutrient recommended daily amounts. This study highlights the alarming prevalence of overweight and obesity and poor diet quality of individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Over the course of the last 30 years, inclusive education has emerged as a key aim of education policies around the world. Also in Europe, most countries took efforts to make their education systems more inclusive—which led to growing numbers of children and young persons with disabilities in general education in Europe. The implementation processes of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) fuelled these efforts. However, as some authors have argued, not all students with disabilities seem to have benefited in the same way from these developments—such as children and young persons with intellectual disability (ID). This paper aims to explore this phenomenon in more depth by comparing some measures in relation to the implementation processes of the UNCRPD of seven European countries. Doing so, we analyze trends in placements (mainstream and special schools) of students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in general and of students with intellectual disability specifically. As we show, an increase of students identified as having SEN in mainstream schools can be observed in all countries during the implementation process of the UNCRPD. However, in comparison to this rather broad group of learners, the percentage of students with intellectual disability in mainstream settings did not increase as much. Furthermore, the calculation of the “exclusion rate” revealed that this group of learners remains a key population of special schools. These results need to be understood as effects of specific shortcomings in the implementation of the UNCRPD, as we discuss in a further section. We conclude our paper with recommendations on future research and policies on inclusive education regarding students with intellectual disability.

The transformational role education plays in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities has not been fully examined. The purpose of this study was to explore and investigate the meanings people with intellectual disabilities construct of their experiences in post-secondary and higher education. Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology was the qualitative methodology adopted for the study. Individual interviews were conducted with 27 people with intellectual disabilities and analysed in stages. These stages included the creation of I-Poems offering a unique opportunity for individual participant voices to be heard. Three core themes emerged to describe living an authentic life: learning (with the emphasis on increased skills, independence and opportunities); relationships (in particular, the importance of friendships), and perceptions including the existing realities of life for those with intellectual disabilities. The findings advance previous work highlighting the link between living a more authentic life and how education transforms how people with intellectual disabilities view themselves.

Here, we report three attempts to replicate a finding from an influential psychological study (Griskevicius et al., 2011b). The original study found interactions between childhood SES and experimental mortality-priming condition in predicting risk acceptance and delay discounting outcomes. The original study used US student samples. We used British university students (replication 1) and British online samples (replications 2 and 3) with a modified version of the original priming material, which was tailored to make it more credible to a British audience. We did not replicate the interaction between childhood SES and mortality-priming condition in any of our three experiments. The only consistent trend of note was an interaction between sex and priming condition for delay discounting. We note that psychological priming effects are considered fragile and often fail to replicate. Our failure to replicate the original finding could be due to demographic differences in study participants, alterations made to the prime, or other study limitations. However, it is also possible that the previously reported interaction is not a robust or generalizable finding.