The concept of quality of life represents to people with intelectual disabilities a foundation to shape quality support, which enables an optimal development and welfare for each individual. Spirituality as one of the essential dimensions to the quality of life gives meaning to the individual’s life in a community. Therefore, the job of all experts who work with people with intelectual disabilities is to create opportunities and conditions for development and experience these two parts of life, which affect their activity, satisfaction, informing their experience and progress. Simultaneously these parts of life represent a part of an individual’s support system. With a qualitative phenomenological research and the help of group interview we examined how adult people with intelectual disabilities incorporate spirituality into their lives and whether this affects their quality of life. With this research we wanted to present a personal experience of people with intelectual disabilities, which is most sensible to do with respect to examining the quality of life, improvement of expert support service, and the personal planning of support. The results have shown that people with intelectual disabilities search the meaning of life in relationships as working together, meals, residence, visits, and celebrations mean a tremendous amount to them. They want to have time to calm down and meet with God through prayer, conversations, going to Mass, and pilgrimages. They find the meaning of life in various social gatherings and authentic presence in the moment, which they experience through personal contacts with other people, calming down with music or spiritual connection with God and other people through prayer. In this sense, spirituality positively affects the experience of improving the quality of life. Based on individual experience we provided concrete guidelines for experts on how to structure a spiritual programme and encouraged them to give the meaning of spirituality serious consideration.
|
