‘I could never do that before’: effectiveness of a tailored Internet support intervention to increase the social participation of youth with disabilities

Abstract

The Internet could be a viable method to facilitate social participation for youth with disabilities. Youth identified the benefits of one-to-one support at home and training of the family compared with typical group training at school. Despite its success with this group of youth, the time and effort intensive nature of this approach may limit the viability of such programmes. Further longitudinal research should investigate whether Internet use is sustained post intervention, and to identify the factors that best support ongoing successful and safe use.

A grounded theory of Internet and social media use by young people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)

“…Within the current study, siblings were mentioned more frequently than parents as supporting social media use and some parents evidently found it difficult to find out about technology. This reinforces Raghavendra et al's [9] findings that there is great variability between families and friends in terms of technical knowledge and digital literacy abilities.…”

“…Many adolescents claim they could not live without the Internet and love how new technology helps them communicate with people [73], which is supported by Helseth and Misvaer [74] who found peer relationships were a psychosocial factor that adolescents used to evaluate their quality of life. Within the current study, the desire to use the Internet and social media (especially Facebook) was unanimously expressed amongst the participants and extends understanding from previously cited literature that people who use AAC perceive benefits for widening and clarifying communication with others through the use of mobile technologies [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…As shown earlier, Raghavendra et al [9] found the digital skills of parents, siblings and friends were significant influences on levels of computer use. Participants also spoke about working collaboratively with family or personal staff to access, share and input content onto the Internet or social media sites such as Facebook.…”

“…Raghavendra et al [9] found participants with physical disabilities had emphasised that their siblings and friends were heavily involved in teaching them digital skills and had showed them how to use the Internet and helped them to use certain sites and also connected with them online. Within the context of the current study, it was evident that working collaboratively to use mainstream technology with an orthographically literate adult on motivational activities (such as Facebook) had enhanced the opportunity for orthographic exposure.…”

The rhetoric and reality of e-health: a critical assessment of the benefits of e-health in primary health care

“…Our own work and that of others has shown that Australians from lower income and disadvantaged backgrounds face challenges to using ICT in general, as well as for health purposes, and may need intensive support if they are to become the 'empowered consumers' envisioned by the E-Health Strategy (e.g. Goodall et al 2010;Newman et al 2010;Baum et al 2012;Raghavendra et al 2013;Wen et al 2011). Some studies of the effectiveness of e-health also show that benefits do not necessarily accrue as expected.…”