CHALLENGES AND MOTIVATION OF EMPLOYED PEOPLE WITH DISABILITY

COR JESU COLLEGE

BACHELOR OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION
MAJOR IN SCHOOL PHYSICAL EDUCATION

RESEARCHERS:
Hernan, Mia Jeselle F.
Lauda, Anna Glaiza
Lorenzo, Nesly Van G.
Paclibar, Princess Dei Ann
 Introduction

Employed persons with disability experienced the practice of unfair treatment in the

society that hinders them to participate in the society and builds a barrier for them to be

employed without discrimination. One the major barrier experienced by the handicapped workers

is the negative mentalities and misinterpretations of co employees and employers. And although

persons with disability have many challenges towards their job, employed persons with disability

is still greatly motivated towards their employment.

According to Philips et al.(2014), having an employee with a disability can lead to low

employment rates and low earnings and in the study of Lengnick et al.(2008), the results showed

that most managers are not exceptionally proactive in procuring people with disability and that

most businesses hold clich convictions not bolstered by research prove. Although, some

researches have begun to gather discoveries on components that influence the acknowledgment

of employees with inabilities, many gaps stay in the comprehension of the idea of

acknowledgment and its connection to the work of individuals with incapacities. (Vornholt et al.,

2013).
 People with disability experienced a lot of difficulty like poverty. Aside

from poverty, separation and bias are the real difficulties that people with

incapacities confront in their regular lives (Tabug & Mina, 2011). In the

global context, the study of Pagan (2009) showed that individuals with

inabilities in the 13 countries of Europe will probably be selfemployed than

individuals without incapacities. Self-employment gives adaptability and a

superior conformity between handicap status and working life. According to

Gilbride et al.(2003) in his study of Employing People With Disabilities in the

Taiwanese Workplace with a participants of 12 Taiwanese employers in the

private enterprise sector with two or more years of experience hiring

employees with disabilities beyond the required employment quota enacted

by the Taiwanese government, results identified four main reasons that led to

hiring, including personal experience relating to people with disabilities,

economic concerns, charitable perspectives, and policy implications.

Although the employers were highly willing to collaborate with vocational

rehabilitation systems, their needs for services rendered differed in the

distinct employment processes.

In the ASEAN context, in the study of Lamichhane, (2012) in Nepal, most of the people

with disability were employed in non-governmental sectors like private restaurants and private

schools. And people with disability were able to discovery new abilities and some positive life

changes were experienced by people with disability in their workplace. In China one new child is

born with a disability in every 40 seconds and this can also be seen in some developing third
world countries. This study showed that most of the people with disability are facing difficulties

in education, clinical and social welfare (Stratford & Ng, 2000).

In the Philippines, Schelzig (2005) noted that out of more than 100,000 employable

PWDs that are registered with the DOLE, only less than 10 percent are wage employed. In

addition, The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10M or Ten (10%) percent of the

total population of the Philippines is comprised of persons with physical, sensory, or mental

impairment. In the study of Reyes et al., (2011) in Rosario, Batangas, Philippines, most of the

study participants did not even finish elementary education. The most common reason for not

going to school ever or completing schooling is poverty. Employment rate among the

respondents, however, is slightly lower (at 47%) than that in Metro Manila (50%). If the

visually-impaired has the highest proportion with incomegenerating jobs (72%) in Metro Manila

(who are usually masseurs), the hearing-impaired has the highest employment rate (58%) in

Rosario, who are usually farmers/farm workers.

Wehbi & ElLahib, (2007) stated that, people with disability experience many obstacles

to finding and keeping a job. As various studies, data and accounts discuss about the challenges

experience by the people with disability towards their employment, in the ASEAN region, in the

Philippines and in global context there is a need to go deeper and explore their motivations for

them to be employed. However as studies on the challenges and motivations of employed people

with disability are still lacking in the Philippines. The researchers of this study are challenge to

investigate and know the motivations and difficulties faced by employed persons with disability

in their working life.

Theoretical lens

This study can be seen through these theories: social model of disability of Union of the

Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS, 1976), Marxist analysis of disability of Marx

& Engels, 1994 and the push pull theory. These theories attempted to discuss about the different

factors of discrimination and challenges of a people with disability in their society or workplace.

On one hand, The social model of disability was first put forth in the United Kingdom in

a 1976 statement by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS, 1976). It

was later discussed in detail by Corker (2000), Finkelstein (1980), and Oliver (1983, 1990,

1996). Instead of a narrow focus on functional limitations, the problem, according to the social

model, is societys failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of

disabled people are fully taken into account in its social organization (Oliver, 1996, p. 32).

Disability, according to the social model, encompasses all factors that impose restrictions on

people with disabilities, ranging from negative social attitudes to institutional discrimination,

from inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport systems, from segregated education to

exclusion in work arrangements, and so on.

While it is acknowledged that the relationships of people with disabilities to their bodies

involve elements of pain and struggle that perhaps cannot be eliminated or mitigated, yet many

of the barriers that people with disabilities face are the consequences of having those physical

impairments under existing social and economic arrangements, especially the means of industrial

production. These social and economic systems could but do not accommodate disabled peoples

physical conditions or integrate their struggles into the cultural concept of everyday life (Asch &

Fine, 1988). The UK social model approach to understanding disability is a sociological one with
a Marxist emphasis, wherein people with disabilities are viewed as oppressed, a standpoint

which is not often found in the United States (Pfeiffer, 1996).

On the other hand, Karl Marx believed any understanding of human societies must begin

with the material conditions of human existence, or the economics of producing the necessities

of life. The economic mode of production, due to its importance, influences other aspects of life,

such as political organization, ideology, religion and culture: the ideas of the ruling class are in

every epoch the ruling ideas: that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at

the same time its ruling intellectual force (Marx & Engels, 1994, p. 15).

Marxist writers analyze disability as a social problem that is directly linked to the

changing mode of production: definitions of disability and other social problems are influenced

by both the economic and social structures and the core values of particular modes of production

existing in a historical time period (Oliver, 1990; Priestley, 1999). For Oliver (1990), the

individualized and pathologized approach to disability emerged due to the functional necessity of

a workforce that is physically and intellectually able to meet the demands of industrialization.

Lastly, Push-pull theory was first applied to entrepreneurial motivation in the 1980s

(Amit & Muller, 1995; Kirkwood, 2009). Whereas pull factors are typically considered to be

positively motivated, push factors imply that entrepreneurship is chosen under duress, despite

ones preference and due to a lack of other options (Amit & Muller, 1995; Bates, 1997; Dawson

& Henley, 2012; Gilad & Levine, 1986). Pull factors are widely believed to be more prevalent

among entrepreneurs than push factors (Dawson & Henley, 2012; Gilad & Levine, 1986;

Kirkwood, 2009). However, push factors played a stronger role during economic recession due

to rates of unemployment and work-related insecurity (Dawson & Henley, 2012; Giacomin,
Janssen, Guyot, & Lohest, 2011; Hughes, 2003). In 2001, the push-pull dichotomy was re-

conceptualized as opportunity-based and necessity-based entrepreneurship (Dawson &

Henley, 2012; Giacomin et al., 2011; Hessels, Gelderen, & Thurik, 2008; Reynolds, Camp,

Bygrave, Autio, & Hay, 2001).

Purpose of the study

The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study will be to explore on the

challenges and motivations of employed persons with disability in their journey towards their

employment in the province of Davao del sur, Philippines.

Research questions

In this study, we were being guided with the following research questions:

1. What are the challenges of persons with disability in their journey towards their

employment?
2. What are their motivations to become employed despite of their disabilities?

Significance of the Study

This study is beneficial to the following:

Person with Disabilities: this study can help the Persons With Disability (PWD) motivated as

they continue their journey in their working life.

Employed Persons with disability: this study can help the employed persons with disability to

pursue their job without hesitation.

Students with disability: this study can help those students with disability to be motivated to

pursue their studies , boost their self-esteem and they can feel the sense of belongingness.
Student: This study can help the students to have deeper understanding about the life of a person

with disabilities and can be a motivation tool for them to pursue their study.

Parents: this study can help the parents especially those parents having children with disabilities

to look on the bright side of their childrens disability and for them to support their children

regardless on his/her situation.

Community: this study can help the community to understand the worth of a person with

disability.

Employers: this study can help the employers to understand their employed PWD and to give

opportunities for the persons with disability to be employed

Future researchers: This study could encourage their interests to conduct more research

associated to this study and this could help support their future researches.

Scope and Limitation

This study focuses on the standpoints of an employed person with disability. The

researchers will conduct an interview with different questions. The interview focuses only on the

challenges and motivations of an employed person with disability in his/her working life. The

duration of this study took a long period of time due to the accessibility of the locality and some

instances that needed clarification of the respondents. Our selected participants will be from

Davao del Sur who is employed in different working areas. That included giving letters of

consent to the participants asking permission to the participants interviews, casual discussion on

the participants, and validation of the transcribed data.

Definition of Terms

To facilitate better understanding on the content of our action research, the following

terms are defined conceptually and operationally.

Person with disability: Any person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially

limits one or more major life activities; has a record of such impairment; or is regarded as having

such an impairment.

Challenges: something that by its nature or character serves as a call to battle, contest, special

effort, etc.

Motivation: the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way; the general

desire or willingness of someone to do something.

Employed: is a person that is hired or engaged in a certain service.

Review of Related Literature

In this section, various literature and studies related to the proposed study are reviewed to

establish the necessary background needed by the researchers and readers in further

understanding of the study.

Specifically, this section aims to provide some information about the life of people with

disability, employment of people with disability, challenges experienced by employed people

with disability in their workplace and motivations of people towards employment.

Life of people with disability

 Employing people with disability can reduce the community poverty. People with

disability experiences real difficulties in life and most of these difficulties are poverty, separation

and bias in their regular day to day experience (Tabuga & Mina, 2011). In the study of

Reyes et.al, (2011) on persons with disability on rural Philippines, the results showed that most

of their respondents did not accomplish their elementary education and the main reason is due to

poverty. Moreover, only 3 out of 10 respondents are aware of the important policies that were

intended to improve their well-being. Among the 31 respondents who have knowledge about any

of the policies on discounts, only 10 of them have ever enjoyed at least one of these discounts

and possess a PWD ID card.

Employment of people with disability

It is already known that that disabled people vary in the nature and severity of their

impairments, but the shape of the relationship between disability and employment cannot be

predicted unambiguously from theory, and has been subject to little analysis (Berthoud, 2008). In

Taiwan, in the study of Gilbride et. Al, (2003) with 12 Taiwanese employer with a 2 years

experience of hiring people with dis ability, the results identified that there are four main reasons

why they are hiring people with disability and those are personal experience relating to people

with disabilities, economic concerns, charitable perspectives, and policy implications.

Public policies give greater importance to the inclusion of disabled people in the labor

market and suggest ways to implement accommodative measures to these ends (Shier, et. Al,

2009). And Although, some research has started to gather data on factors that affect the

acceptance of employees with disabilities, many gaps remain in the understanding of the

concept of acceptance and its relation to the employment of people with disabilities (Vornholt,

et. Al, 2013)

Challenges experienced by employed people with disability in their workplace

Having an employee with disability can lead to low employment rates and low earnings

(Robinson, et. Al, 2013) and Peck, B., & Kirkbride, L. T. (2001) said that that is why most of the

employers have an unspoken fears about hiring people with disability in the workplace .

The study of Kaye et al., (2011) suggested that that businesses may use to encourage

enlisting and maintenance of work areas with incapacities, and additionally new open projects or

strategy changes that could expand work drive interest among working-age grown-ups who have

handicap.

Motivations of people with disability towards employment

Difficulties in motivation are often based on disturbances in body image, which in turn

are related handicap (Prosen, 2000) .For people with disabilities, taking part in the working life

is an essential condition to an equal participation to society. In Western industrial countries

political attention to the labor market participation of people with disabilities has increased

(Marin, Prinz, & Queisser, 2004). According to Andreassen, (2004) Personal experience with

health problems and disability are motivations to engage in helping others in similar situations

and to improve the living conditions of social groups with which one experiences a common

identity.
 METHODOLOGY

This chapter provides a vivid description on how the research process will be carried out.

Discussion specifically will be confined to research design and procedure, the participants and

the manner they were selected, data collection techniques, data source and analysis,

trustworthiness and ethical consideration. Moreover, explanation on the role of the researchers is

also included as this is an important distinguishing factor for quality in data analysis.

Research Design

This study is a phenomenological qualitative research. As Van Manen, (1990) stated, it

aims to describe the lived experiences of people on a particular phenomenon. It tries to see the

common experiences of individuals in relation to a phenomenon. Furthermore,

phenomenological study is understanding or identifying a phenomenon or object of human

experience.
 This study utilized phenomenology as a research method. The goal of qualitative

phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a phenomenon. As this is a

qualitative analysis of narrative data, methods to analyze its data must be quite different from

more traditional or quantitative methods of research. Lester (1999) describes phenomenology as

a research methodology that seeks to describe the basic lived experience through how they are

perceived by the actors in a situation. It is further explained that phenomenological method is

particularly effective at bringing to the fore the experiences and perceptions of individuals from

their own perspectives, and therefore challenging to structural and normative assumptions.

Adding an imperative dimension to it to enables it to be used as a basis for practical theory,

which my later enlighten, support or challenge policy and action.

As a research method, Moustakas (1194) stated that phenomenology is a study of essence

in order to uncover the meaning in everyday existence. This particular research method makes it

imperative to gather deep information regarding the perceptions of humans through inductive

and qualitative methods such as interviews, discussions, and participant observation, and

presenting it from the perspective of the individual. Pure phenomenological research seeks

essentially to describe rather than explain and to start from perspective that is free from

hypotheses or preconceptions.

Moreover, Moustakas (1994) explained the four aspects of human experience that are of

interest to the phenomenological researcher: lived space, lived body, lived relationships, and

lived time. In other words, human see different realities in different situations, in the company of

different people and at different times. The researcher must then be careful not to bring any

preconceived framework or hypotheses due to the unique perceptions and lived experiences of

the key informants.

Participants

The participants of our study will be selected persons having disability employed in any

institution as well as a resident from different municipality with in the province of Davao Del

Sur. The study will only cover those people having disability; we researchers will only select at

least 10 participants to be interview.

Data Collection
We will use the Key Informant Interview that involves interviewing a select group

of individuals who are likely to provide needed information, ideas, and insights on a particular

subject. It conducts in-depth interviews on a specific topic(s) in which knowledgeable and/or

experienced participants can provide significant contributions to the investigative inquiry. A

structured or semi-structured questionnaire is administered one-on-one interview on selected

informants that allows the researcher to seek insights, ask follow-up questions, explore different

points made during the course of conversation and identify distinctions in perspectives.

Before we will having the KII, we will write a letter of permission. We will use tape

recorders, videos and written reports for their live testimonies. The participants must be aware of

the mechanics before the interviews.

A Focus Group Discussion (FGD) will also place wherein we conduct an interview

together with the participants. The focus group discussion will be plan carefully to a series of

discussions designed that obtain perceptions on a define area of interest in a permissive, non-

threatening environment (Krueger and Casey 2009). Moreover, for Thomas and Nelson (1996),

focus group was an efficient form of data collection were the researcher can amass information

about several people in one session.

 In collecting and gathering data for our study, we will consider this typical qualitative data

gathering strategies. These includ: address research questions, the researcher will decide which

people and research sites could best provide information. We will purposefully select individuals

and sites that provide the necessary information. We will ask permission to collect data from

individuals and sites. This permission will do through sending letters to the informants. During

the actual interview, there will be a focus monitoring on their answers related to the study. It will

be in a form of written testimonies, capture images, recorded videos and other forms of

documentations. After the data gathering, the researchers will analyze it using the comparative

analysis method and interpret it through transcribing procedure.

Analysis and interpretation of data

In data analysis all interviews will be recorded, coded, transcribed and analyze as they

will gather. This study employs the basic procedures for data analysis. First, data collecting will

organize and then reduce through summarization and categorization and then finally, data will be

identify and link.

In the process of coding the data, the researchers will observe open coding in which

concepts are identify and develop in terms of their properties and dimensions. This includes

asking questions about the data, making comparisons for similarities and differences between

incidents, events, or other phenomena. Similar ones are group to form categories. From the

categories of the transcribe data, the accounts will subject into data reduction wherein only the

relevant answers of the respondents will taken into account; those non-relevant narrations will

not consider. The contain relevant answers of the participants will be the basis for determining

the emerging themes and will be subject to analysis and interpretation.

Role of the Researchers

In this qualitative inquiry as in most others, The researchers are the instruments

(Patton, 2002, p.80) through which the data will collect. In this study, we the researchers who

will facilitate the research procedure, transcribe and analyze the data under study. We will

explain the purpose of the study and the procedures of gathering and collecting data to the

informants took hold of the exact documents on file, available upon request. We have the

opportunity to interview with all the employed person with disability with in Davao del sur.

After transcribing, we will analyze the data being gather and formulate common themes

from the responses of the participants out from the questions given by the researchers and we

merge the responses of the participants in the thematic analysis.

Trustworthiness

The aim of trustworthiness in a qualitative inquiry is to support the argument that the

inquirys findings are worth paying attention to (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In any qualitative

research study, three issues of trustworthiness demand attention: credibility, transferability and

confirmability.

To establish credibility, we followed Lincoln and Gubas (1985) specific researcher

activities that can enhance the credibility of data collection. We had a prolonged engagement to

the participants. We will conduct initial survey, interviews and validate the data transcribed.

To address transferability, the complete set of data were stored on file and were made

available to other researchers who wish to conduct the same research or wish to use them in

some cases.
 To establish confirmability. Miles and Huberman (1994) consider that a key criterion for

conrmability is the extent to which the researcher admits his or her own predispositions. In our

study, confirmability was addressed through validation and confirmation of the participants who

are employed person with disability.

Ethical Considerations

Before we will commence our research we will look at whether ethically our study is

sound. In order to do this, it is crucial that the following series of ethical issues need attention.

Upon conducting our study, we will make sure that we inform the participants and ask

their permission to conduct an interview to them. We will submit letters to the person with

disability and asking permission to conduct our study. We will go through a formal process by

asking personally the employed person with disability who were the informants in the study for

the interview.

When approval will grant, we will personally talk and hand the communication to the

informants. We will convey to them that they will participate in a study, explain to them the

purpose of the study, the benefits gain from the study. During the interview, we will ask

permission from the informants to take a record for their answers.

To establish anonymity, researchers will protect the identity of the participants and

organizations/institutions. Researchers will remove identifying details such us names, places,

company names and other details that reveal identities of persons or organizations being studied

(Corti & Backhouse, 2000).

 To establish confidentiality, researchers will uphold confidentiality to the highest degree.

Researchers will have a careful planning and execution of the research study from

conceptualization to the presentation and publication of the results.

To establish inform consent, the inform consent contains the purpose of the study, time

element, procedures, risk and benefits involve, and an explanation of voluntary involvement of

participants and their right to withdraw from the study. All of these must be written in an inform

consent form to be signed by the study participants before the conduct of the study.