Applied Psychology of Intellectual Disabilities

Structure & Teaching

Full-time students will study all 180 Level M credits (i.e. six units) in one full year. Part-time students will normally study three units each year, and will begin to explore potential research ideas and research methodologies in the first year. 

Here are the units you will study (part-time students will study these in the first year):

• Empowerment and the Social Construction of Learning Disabilities: This course examines knowledge, theory and practice about learning disability and empowering people with such a label through a social constructionist lens.
• Participatory and Enabling Practices: This unit covers working with people with intellectual disabilities using effective and enabling practices.
• Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods: This unit provides an introduction to experimental and survey-based research methods, and quantitative data analysis techniques. It covers qualitative methods for data collection and analysis, as well as to how to write research reports in both traditions.

The following units will be studied in the first year by full-time students and in the second year by part-time students:

• Intellectual Disabilities, Families and Systemic Practice: This unit aims to provide you with an understanding of families including an appreciation of experiences of families with an intellectually disabled member. It aims to enhance your abilities to support families via theoretically informed, partnership-based empowering practices.
• Research Project: The research project requires you to initiate, conduct and report upon an original piece of research. The work is conducted to deadlines agreed with a project supervisor and project must include empirical quantitative or qualitative research – data collection and relevant analysis must be included. Any statistical analysis must be both descriptive (e.g. means, standard deviations and graphs etc.) and inferential (i.e. statistical tests).

You choose one of the following option units to complete the course (again, part-time students study the option unit in the second year):

• Communication and Investigative Interviewing of People with Intellectual Disabilities: This unit aims to promote communication skills and opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities and outline the status of the law concerning vulnerable adults as witnesses/victims. It aims to provide you with the opportunity to examine issues that arise when people with intellectual disabilities are interviewed as witnesses/victims of crime.
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: This unit outlines and discusses the efficacy of cognitive behavioural therapy. You are strongly encouraged to view this course as an introduction to the academic literature on this subject, rather than as training to be a therapist.
• Critical Disability Studies and Intellectual Disability: The perspective of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) is about how society and its agents respond to the labelled person's circumstances rather than how intellectual disability inhabits the person. This unit will address the relationship between workers and disabled people that CDS might call for. Here disability and intellectual disability in particular will be a standpoint or position from which to view society, in contrast to disability as a categorisation of people.

---

Back To Top