Depressive mood in students with mild intellectual disability: students' reports and teachers' evaluations.
The present study examined 310 students with mild intellectual disability (ID) who attended special schools and self-contained classes in mainstream schools with regard to their reports of depressive mood, and loneliness and social skills, and teachers' perception of the students' academic, social and behavioural competencies. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that: students in special schools reported higher levels of depression and felt lonelier than mainstream school students; girls exhibited a greater sense of depressive mood than boys; teachers assessed boys as having higher academic competencies than girls; and boys were considered more easily distracted and less independent. However, teachers considered girls to have more adequate social adjustment, and be more task-oriented and more independent. For both groups, depressive mood can be predicted by distractibility and loneliness; by gender and lower academic competencies for special school students; or mainly by difficulties in social adjustment in the case of mainstream school students.
Heiman
T
T
Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University of Israel, Tel Aviv, Israel. talihe@oumail.openu.ac.il
D002648:Child; D003863:Depression / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D007557:Israel / Q000453:epidemiology; D008282:Mainstreaming, Education / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008297:Male; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012307:Risk Factors; D017678:Sex Distribution; D012917:Social Adjustment