The Psychosocial Weil-Being of Finnish Adolescents with Visual Impairments versus those with Chronic Conditions and those with no Disabilities

Abstract

The psychosocial well-being of 115 adolescents with visual impairments was compared with that of 44 adolescents with chronic conditions and 607 adolescents with no disabilities. It was found that the adolescents with visual impairments, especially those who were blind, had more difficulties in their relationships with friends than did the other two groups, but had fewer problems with psychological well-being than did the adolescents with chronic conditions.Many studies have found that adolescents with chronic illnesses and disabilities are at an increased risk of developing psychosocial problems because of their continuous need for medical care, special educational services, and a range of social services, as well as other people's responses to them, which can cause emotional strain (Cadman,

Psychological Adjustment in Adolescents with Vision Impairment

“…Because internalising symptoms, such as unhappiness and worry, may be a response to vision loss and to difficulties with mastering age-appropriate developmental tasks, we expected to find higher levels of emotional problems in adolescents with vision impairment than in their sighted peers. Given the observed problems of students with vision impairment with building and maintaining peer relationships (Christian, 2002;Huurre & Aro, 2000), we also expected to find higher levels of peer-related problems. Available research did not find differences in levels of empathy between students with and without vision impairment (Griffin & Nes, 2005).…”

“…Because some developmental tasks of adolescence (such as gaining autonomy from parents and building intimate relationships) may be more difficult to attain for students with vision impairment than for their sighted peers (e.g., Huurre & Aro, 2000;Lifshitz et al, 2007;Pfeiffer & Pinquart, 2011), we expected that the discrepancies between psychological adjustment of students with vision impairment and sighted peers would become stronger across adolescence. According to our knowledge, only one available study provided data for this assumption.…”

“…Based on the assumptions that adolescents with vision impairment face more stressors than their sighted peers and that gender-typical problem behaviour may result from stressors (Huurre & Aro, 2000;Lifshitz et al, 2007), we explored whether gender differences in problem behaviour would be stronger in adolescents with vision impairment. In fact, Huurre and Aro (2000) observed that girls rather than boys with vision impairment showed elevated levels of depressive symptoms.…”

“…Some studies found higher levels of internalising and externalising problems in adolescents with vision impairment compared with adolescents without impairment or general test norms (Kammerer, Köster, Monninger, & Scheffler;Koenes & Karshmer, 2000). Others found this only in some of the domains assessed-in social problems (Maes & Grietens, 2004), obsession-compulsion, hostility, and paranoid ideation, but not in interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety (Garaigordobil & Bernarás, 2009)-or in subgroups (girls but not boys; Huurre & Aro, 2000). However, some studies found no significant differences between adolescents with vision impairment and their sighted peers (Kef & Deković, 2004;Koklanis, Abel, & Aroni, 2006;Yoshida, Ichikawa, Ishikawa, & Hori, 1998).…”

“…Such an imbalance is likely to be found in children and adolescents with vision impairment (Ammerman, Van Hasselt, Hersen, & Moore, 1989). Sources of psychological distress of adolescents with vision impairment may result from difficulties in participating in activities charged with vision content, a higher dependency on others, more family control, negative ideas about physical attraction, being discriminated against by others, and difficulties when mastering age-appropriate developmental tasks (Huurre & Aro, 2000;Lifshitz, Hen, & Weisse, 2007).…”