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Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore support persons’ views on remote communication for persons with communicative and cognitive disabilities, and on factors enabling self-determination and participation.

Materials and methods: Five focus groups with 21 support persons were conducted. They were recorded and transcribed and data were analyzed qualitatively using focus group analysis methodology.

Results: The participants experience how remote communication can enable users to have increased control in their lives and how remote communication can enable self-determination and participation. Access to remote communication has a dual effect on safety. There are experiences about communicative rights of the users not being met and there is a need for better access to technology, information, and experts. There is also a need for more competence and coordination among staff and support to the users. Challenges emerge in the support persons’ dedication to the users’ right to communicate.

Conclusion: People with communicative and cognitive disabilities need access to remote communication in order to have control over their own lives and to achieve self-determination and participation in society. Support persons carry a large responsibility and can provide valuable insights of users’ communication situation.

Purpose: To explore barriers and pathways to the inclusion of persons with mental and intellectual disabilities in technical and vocational education and training programmes in four East African countries, in order to pave the way to greater inclusion.

Materials and methods: An explorative, qualitative study including 10 in-depth interviews and a group discussion was conducted with coordinators of different programmes in four East African countries. Two independent researchers coded the interviews inductively using Atlas.ti. The underlying framework used is the culture, structure, and practice model.

Results: Barriers and pathways to inclusion were found in the three interrelated components of the model. They are mutually reinforcing and are thus not independent of one another. Barriers regarding culture include negative attitudes towards persons with mental illnesses, structural barriers relate to exclusion from primary school, rigid curricula and untrained teachers and unclear policies. Culture and structure hence severely hinder a practice of including persons with mental disabilities in technical and vocational education and training programmes. Pathways suggested are aiming for a clearer policy, more flexible curricula, improved teacher training and more inclusive attitudes.

Conclusions: In order to overcome the identified complex barriers, systemic changes are necessary. Suggested pathways for programme coordinators serve as a starting point.

Purpose: People with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) generally live independently among the wider community. This can result in social exclusion and feelings of loneliness. Therefore, social work organizations aim to socially include people with MID through organizing activities in neighbourhoods that should lead to enlarged networks and increased societal participation. The “Communal Table” is such a, group-orientated, intervention that organizes monthly dinners in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Because little is known about the effective- ness of interventions aiming to bring about social inclusion for people with MID we explored which types of participants were reached and whether and how the intervention brought about the intended outcomes.

Methods: We performed a theory-based evaluation, using participatory observations and qualitative interviews (n = 19). The Communal Table attracted a diverse and loyal group of participants.

Results: We distinguished four types of participants—lonely participants, activist participants, satisfied participants and calculating participants—whose pre-existing networks played a significant role in their individual needs for support and the outcomes of the intervention. Outcomes reported included experiences of conviviality and warmth, temporary relief of underlying problems and an overall positive opinion about the intervention, but network enlargement or increased societal participation were not reported.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that social network interventions for people with MID should be tailored to participants’ pre-existing networks and related individual needs to be successful.

With inclusive research being an emerging field of interest, there is growing recognition that establishing collaborative relationships between researchers with and without ID entails specific demands. However, since studies on collaboration in inclusive research merely provide individual reports on experiences and challenges in one particular research project, building a shared knowledge base of concrete competencies considered important for those involved merits attention. This study contributes to a shared knowledge base in asking people with and without ID with (experiential) knowledge of inclusive research for competencies they consider important in collaborating in inclusive research in general, that is, without reference to a specific research project they participated in. Researchers with and without ID, coaches, policy makers, and teachers involved in the education of people with ID participated in this study. Data were collected from a focus group, individual interviews, and expert meetings. Qualitative analysis was carried out

immediately after each moment of data collection, providing the use of increasing insights in each consecutive phase of data collection. Participants describe that establishing collaborative relationships between researchers with and without ID in inclusive research requires the commitment of both parties. They mentioned concrete competencies they consider important for people with and without ID to collaborate in inclusive research in the categories: building a mutual relationship, communicating, achieving a collaboration in which everyone involved can contribute, being aware of skills and developmental needs, and being aware of impact. Clearly, describing competencies for people with and without ID is not intended to exclude anyone who does not possess these competencies from collaboration in inclusive research. However to avoid “tokenism,” this study might contribute to effective participation of people with ID in inclusive research in providing concrete competencies considered important in collaboration.

Purpose: Examining everyday challenges in the interactions between people with intellectual disabilities and their staff, as seen from the user’s perspective, is an important perspective in health care research. Involving people with intellectual disabilities as so-called co-researchers is a relatively unexplored research strategy. In this paper, co-researchers participated in all the steps of the research process, from planning to reporting, in addition to the written reporting of the findings. The aim of this study was to explore how people with intellectual disabilities experienced a filmed vignette of an everyday situation.

Method: Based on audio-recorded and transcribed individual and focus-group interviews with people with intellectual disabil- ities, performed by co-researchers with intellectual disabilities together with researchers, qualitative content analysis was used.

Results: The analysis reveals three themes: “being emotionally touched”, “being aware of the other”, and “being unclear”.

Conclusions: The results are discussed in light of normalization and participation in society with independence and one’s own decision-making. Regarding the care of people with intellectual disabilities, the main finding is the need to focus not only on greater involvement of this population in their own daily lives, but also to teach self-determination skills. Another finding is the importance of involving people with intellectual impairment as co-researchers.

This study aimed to explore how sex education in special schools in Sweden is influenced and challenged by the multicultural aspects of modern society. In particular, it sought to explore professio- nalls' experiences of sex education and of honour-related experiences among young people with intellectual disabilities. Data from five individual interviews and one focus groups with four profes- sionals were thematically analysed using sexual scripts as a theoretical framework. The results reveal an ambivalent honour-related script geared toward pupils with intellectual disabilities from cul- tural backgrounds differing from those of the Swedish mainstream. The provision of sex education, including information about hon- our-related experiences, is especially important because of these young people’s vulnerability; however, addressing the subject effectively is sensitive and complicated. Colleagues with different cultural backgrounds can act as ‘culture bridges’ for professionals who lack strategies, methods and materials. Increasing profes- sionals’ prerequisite qualifications (e.g. further education, supervision) and adopting autonomy-promoted conduct can empower pupils with intellectual disability to exercise autonomy over their sexuality outside their immediate cultural context.

The present article aimed to explore how the development of reading comprehension is affected when its cognitive basis is compromised. The simple view of reading was adopted as the theoretical framework. The study followed 76 children with mild intellectual disabilities (average IQ = 60.38, age 121 months) across a period of 3 years. The children were assessed for level of reading comprehension (outcome variable) and its precursors decoding and listening comprehension, in addition to linguistic skills (foundational literacy skills, rapid naming, phonological short-term memory, verbal working memory, vocabulary, and grammar) and non- linguistic skills (nonverbal reasoning and temporal processing). Reading comprehension was predicted by decoding and listening comprehension but also by foundational literacy skills and nonverbal reasoning. It is con- cluded that intellectual disabilities can affect the development of reading comprehension indirectly via linguistic skills but also directly via nonlinguis- tic nonverbal reasoning ability.