Self-Determination
Over the years we have seen that involvement with get2gether has had a big and positive impact on the lives of our members. Through some initial reflection we felt that the development of self-determination was key to this, and we were interested in how our work contributed to it.
In 2018 we decided to carry out some research to explore the idea of self-determination and to capture what we do well and so that we could do more of it.
For get2gether Self-Determination means:
Academic research has demonstrated that adults with disabilities or learning disabilities have far fewer opportunities to naturally develop the component skills of self-determination such as choice making, problem solving, self-management etc., and are less self-determined as a result. It has also found that people are more likely to be perceived and treated as an adult once they start displaying the behaviours associated with self-determination.
Our research highlighted a number of key ideas that supported the natural development of self-determination, as well as a number of key barriers. These are:
Download our full findings and report below:
Since being involved with get2gether, many of our members have started to make significant steps towards getting the life they want. They have told us that get2gether has been really important in helping them to do this.
We wanted to understand what it was that get2gether was doing that was supporting members to become more self-determined in this way.
We carried out a thematic analysis of our research and this is what we found:
