Sense of Identity of Students with Mild Intellectual Disabilities in Interactions with Students without Disabilities

A Descriptive Phenomenological Study

Abstract

This article aims to clarify the sense of identity of students with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) by analyzing how they represent themselves in social contexts such as interactions with students without disabilities. Two inter– school exchanges between a special education institution for students with intellectual disabilities and a general high school were targeted, and two students with MID were selected for specific attention. The ethnographic method was utilized to collect visual data pertaining to the social interactions of the students, oral data of their conversations, and narrative data compiled through stimulated recall interviews with the two focal students with MID. The lived experiences of the two selected students as represented by the data were examined using the descriptive phenomenological method. Three major findings were revealed: first, the students with MID related in detail their exchanges with others based on specific events; second, the students with MID did not identify themselves as disabled; rather, they thought they were interesting to others; and third, the sense of identity of the students with MID exhibited developmental coherence through the past, present, and future.