REN Award

Fostering youth’s global self-esteem is a central educational goal (Preckel, 2013) in order to sustain children and adolescents feel accepted and confident about their self-concept, social and academic competencies. Some studies revealed that children and adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) showed lower self-esteem than their peers without ID (Syropoulou, 2021). However, little is known about the way children and adolescents with ID develop an understanding of their self-concept that can facilitate other important outcomes such as academic performance and social competence (Bryne, 1996). At the moment, there is no available instrument for measuring self-esteem in Italian youth with ID; hence there is a need for such an instrument. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to adapt the Italian version of the multidimensional self-esteem test (TMA) for children and adolescents with ID (Bracken, 1993). The TMA is a tool for assessing the socio-emotional adaptation in 9- to 19-year-old youths. It is based on 6 dimensions referring to specific contexts in which general self-esteem is typically divided: 1. interpersonal area (how the subject evaluates his/her social relationships, with peers and with adults); 2. school area (the successes or failures experienced in the class); 3. emotional area (the emotional life, the ability to control negative emotions); 4. family area (relationships in the family, the degree to which one feels loved and valued); 5. body area (appearance, physical and sport abilities); 6. area of ​​mastery over the environment (the feeling of being able to dominate the events of own life). In particular, we tried to adapt three of the its six components: social, academic and physical self-concepts. It has been shown that social, academic, emotional, family and physical dimensions of self-concept and also global self-esteem were positively affected by physical activity and sport practice (Mendo-Lázaro, 2017). Sport practice has been positively related to perceived self-esteem and self-efficacy (Arribas-Galarraga, 2020). However, little is known how different types of sport could affect self-esteem although significant personality differences exist between athletes practicing individual sports and athletes practicing team sports (Šagát, 2021). Therefore, the second aim of the present study was to verify if the practice of different sports could influence self-esteem of athletes with ID. Specifically, we investigated if an open skill, team and situational sport such as soccer could differently affect social, academic and physical self-concepts of children and adolescents with ID from a closed skill, individual sport such as track and field. Twenty-two children and adolescents with ID (18 males, 4 females), aged between 9 and 18 years (13.9 ± 3.3 ys) volunteered to participate in the study. Fourteen subjects were already engaged in soccer and seven subjects were engaged in track and field. Athletes’ training and experience with these sport activities averaged 2.5 (± 1.6) years. All participants were amateur athletes. They habitually trained 2 times per week (60 min/training session). Three main adaptations were done to simplify the original version of the TMA in order to make it suitable for youth with ID: 1. unusual terms were substituted with commonly used terms and concepts to make them more easily to understand (e.g. the item “molte persone si burlano di me” was modified in “molte persone mi prendono in giro”); 2. answers were simplified (“assolutamente vero”, “vero”, “non è vero”, “non è assolutamente vero” were modified in “si, tanto, “si”, “no”, “no, tanto”); 3. the questionnaire was administered as an interview. Each subject participated in a semi-structured interview with the researcher. All the interviews had not the same length, that varied in relation to the needs and circumstances of each subject. Some subjects were able to complete the interview in one meeting, some others needed two or more occasions to be completely interviewed. The main contribution of this preliminary study lies in adapting part of the TMA for use in children and adolescents with ID. Future studies are needed to completely validate the TMA for this special population. Self-esteem in children and adolescents with ID is an aspect that should be further analyzed in relation to sport practice and also to favor optimal performance in sports.