| Abstract [eng] |
The Master‘s Thesis deals with the social worker‘s activity opportunities by improving the quality of life for people with mental disabilities. By applying theoritical and empirical research methods, it was intended to examine the overall conception of the mental disability, disorders and the quality of life, the subjective well-being of people with mental disabilities, to briefly present the situation of people with mental disabilities in Ukraine, to investigate functions of social workers (in Lithuania and Ukraine) and activity opportunities in the support system for people with mental health issues and to examine social and the quality of life support activities of people with mental disabilities while working with these people. To achieve the Master Thesis‘s objective, it has been selected a qualitative individual semi-structured interview method and an applied to customers individual in-depth interview. The study involved 6 individuals with mental disabilities, 10 Lithuanian social workers and 12 Ukrainian specialists working with people with mental disabilities. The theorical scientific literature analysis and empirical research results showed that people with mental disabilities are closely related to the subjective assessment of the quality of life. According to the respondents, most of such individuals are lacking privacy, understanding and caring by their relatives, safe and adapted to them environment, the completeness of the system which would help to fully integrate into society, and financial resources. Social workers (in Lithuania and Ukraine) have more than one responsibility within their organization and provide various general and special social services that improve the quality of life of people with mental disabilities. Services include communication with the client and his family, counseling them, representating, communication and cooperation with certain institutions, documents preparation, cooking and organizing affitional activities, help with shopping, training of social skills and self-support, solving emergent problems and so on. This thesis consists of a summary in Lithuanian, introduction, 2 chapters, conclusions, a list of references (138 sources), a summary in English, annexes. The research data is illustrated by 3 pictures and 28 tables. Annexes provide an operationalization, in-depth semi-structured interview questions for customers, semi-structured interview questions for social workers, excerpts of interviews with clients and social workers. The Thesis consists of 85 pages. |
