Abstract
This article deals with the issue of the dignity and sense of personal dignity of people with disabilities in Poland. According to Statistics Poland, there are over 4.5 million people with disabilities. Although their situation is the subject of analysis conducted by representatives of various scientific disciplines, as well as of social welfare workers, education professionals, health care service workers, and legislators, there are relatively few studies on their understanding and experience of dignity. The presented text includes results of research carried out with a group of 98 people with disabilities. The diagnostic survey method was applied by using a questionnaire. The research tool was the Sense of Self-Dignity Questionnaire (KPWG-3) created by Stanisława Steuden and Paweł Brudek. The obtained empirical material indicates that the surveyed women with disabilities have a higher sense of self-dignity in comparison with the men with disabilities in the scope of the dimension of the disability loss and the total result. However, the studied men with disabilities have a superior self-dignity in the relation (p< 0.001) and experience (p< 0.05) dimensions. Moreover, when taking into account the time of occurrence of the disability, that is to say “congenital disability” vs “acquired disability”, there were no statistically significant differences. In addition, the employment activity of the surveyed people with disabilities did not significantly differentiate the statistical result of the sense of self-dignity. However, there were dignificant differences based on level of education in the cognitive (p< 0.05) and experience (p< 0.001) dimensions, and in the general result (p< 0.05).