The Japanese Journal of Special Education

The present study, which aimed to identify an effective direction for responding to staff burnout in a facility for persons with disabilities, had 2 objectives: (a) identifying the structure of contexts in which support staff experience difficulties when providing support to users, and (b) examining relationships among cognitive evaluations, the frequency of difficult user support contexts, and occupational stress responses. A factor analysis of 50 items from a preliminary study of contexts posing support problems resulted in the extraction of 3 factors: “difficulty of social communication,” “problems of personal independence,” and “self-injurious and other harmful behavior.” Subsequent correlational and multiple linear regression analyses revealed a particularly strong relation between “difficulty of social communication” and occupational stress responses. These results suggest that simply reducing the frequency of users' difficult contexts through direct intervention by specialists would not be sufficient to alleviate staff burnout. They also point to the potential usefulness of modifying the cognitive evaluations of problematic contexts by support staff.

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The present study focused on 2 themes: (a) a historical review of the period from the 1960s to 2012, with respect to transactional education, cooperative education, and education for deepening awareness of issues relating to disabilities and people with disabilities, and (b) the relation of the results of that review to educational objectives. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology encouraged special schools and regular schools to do transactional education. Cooperative education was proposed in order to build equal relations between children with and without disabilities. However, because it was difficult for children without disabilities to develop an understanding of those with disabilities solely from cooperative education, education for deepening awareness of issues relating to disabilities and people with disabilities was created with the purpose of teaching children without disabilities about disabilities and about people with disabilities. Thus, education for deepening awareness of issues relating to disabilities and people with disabilities had a lengthy historical relationship to transactional education and collaborative education. Moreover, cooperative education has characteristic educational objectives relative to transactional education and education for deepening awareness of issues relating to disabilities and people with disabilities, specifically, (a) strengthening the relationships between children with and without disabilities, and (b) having children learn together in groups that include children with and without disabilities. Finally, cooperative education and education for deepening awareness of issues relating to disabilities and people with disabilities deepened the scientific recognition of disabilities and people with disabilities.

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