Effect of unified sports on confidence peer inclusion and psychomotor abilities among individuals with intellectual disability

Abstract

Unified sports are the initiative of the Special Olympics to promote inclusion in real sense, through shared sports training and competition experiences. It joins people with and without intellectual disabilities on the same team with the principle of training together and playing together as a quick and effective path to real friendship, understanding each other, practice more fun, developing motor abilities and fitness and explore their fullest potential. Present study was conducted to see the effect of unified sports on confidence, peer inclusion and psychomotor abilities (finger dexterity and reaction time), utilized pre test post test control group design. 30 students with mild to moderate intellectual disability of age group 12-16 were selected purposively and 30 regular school students of age group 12-14 were selected randomly. After selection of the samples, researcher conducted pre-test for all the subjects with intellectual disability, of both experimental and control group in order to assess confidence, peer acceptance of regular school students, finger dexterity and reaction time. Pre- testing has also been done for regular school students to know newlinetheir level of acceptance of subjects with intellectual disability.Subjects of experimental group were given intervention of selected unified sports for 45 sessions, 6 days in a week for 1 hour in each day, in a well planned and very organized way. newlineAfter the completion of treatment, all the tools of dependent variables were re- administered on the subject with intellectual disability of both the groups i.e. experimental and control. After a gap of six months from post test, researcher re- administered tests for confidence, peer acceptance and psychomotor abilities on SwID and peer acceptance on regular school students.t-test has been used to analyse the data. Effect size has also been calculated to find support for results of t-test.