Summary

This chapter reports the self-evaluations of both domain-specific and more general competencies of youth with disabilities. More than half report they are "very good" or "pretty good" in each of five areas: physical/athletic abilities, computer use, mechanical skills, creative arts, and performing arts. Comparison of parents' and youth's perceptions indicates that, overall, parents tend to report higher opinions of their children's strengths than youth report for themselves. Despite these differences, parents' and youth's perceptions are related to each other in that youth who hold higher estimates of their abilities tend to have parents who also hold high estimates of the youth's abilities and vice versa. Youth also were asked to report on several aspects of their self-advocacy skills. More than half of youth with disabilities report that positive statements reflecting good self-advocacy skills are "very much" like them, and about one-third of youth who identified themselves as persons with disabilities and received services for them report "often" giving their opinions of those services to service providers.

Self-evaluations of the broader concepts of personal autonomy and psychological empowerment, garnered through administration of items selected from those subscales of The Arc's Self-Determination Scale (Wehmeyer 2000) show that half of youth with disabilities score in the high range for personal autonomy, and more than 8 out of 10 have high scores on the psychological empowerment subscale. NLTS2 investigated whether specific instruction in transition planning for youth or their level of participation in the transition planning process was associated with these scores, but no statistically significant relationships were found.

Although there are no differences in findings associated with youth's gender, age, household income, or race/ethnicity, there are some variations associated with disability category. Youth with visual impairments are more likely than youth in many other disability categories to report confidence in interacting with peers and adults, including confidence in expressing their service needs.