| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 特殊教育研究所 === 92 === An Exploratory Study About The Self-concept of High-functioning Autism
Yih-Fen Shieh
National Taiwan Normal University
Abstract
The purpose of this qualitative research was to understand the self-concept of two high-functioning autistic adolescent students (one junior high school student Happy-girl and the other senior high school student Shin-Young). I tried to find out the truth of participants’ self-concept and explore their rich inside world by interviewing them and their significant others.
In this study, two high-functioning autisms were asked to talk about themselves in different dimensions, by which we would understand their emotion, motivation, and value, etc. Then I interviewed their family, teachers, and classmates for confirming and collecting more data. Eventually I found out the general self-concept of high-functioning autisms.
Based on data, we could obtain the self-concept of high-functioning autism from four aspects. First, two participants had different self-concepts in general. Happy-girl seldom talked about herself, and her emotion and behavior presented simply and directly. Shin-Young gave me lots of information about himself, and his behaviors performed consistently with his inner thought.
Second, according to vertical and horizontal structures, Happy-girl’s self-concept maintained at “body image” stage and the sub-domains were independent. And Shin-Young’s was going to “self-identity” stage and the sub-domains were influenced with each other.
Third, I tried to find the self-concept of two participants from two contexts. The relationship in family and the opinion of how they labeled the “autism” would influence their self-concept, especially the emotional self-concept. At school, their self-image and peer self-concept were related to their special performance and whether teachers and schoolmates accepted them or not.
Finally, we would discuss the development of high-functioning autism’s self-concept. The different cognitive ability between two participants made them develop to different stage, and they were both disturbed by lacking of reflexibility. As autistic characteristics, poor social interaction was a barrier to developing their peer and emotional self-concept. Not only the behavior problems influenced their development of social and emotional self-concept but also the different communicative styles affected their peer self-concept and then increased the difficulty of this study.
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