Working with children with intellectual disabilities (ID), Edward Zigler and his colleagues studied five motives in detail: dependency, fear of strangers, expectancy of success, outerdirectedness, and competence motivation (Zigler, Bennet-Givens, & Hodapp 1999). This work encouraged attention to the needs of the "whole person" at a time when the ID field of was narrowly focused on the trait of sub-average intelligence. Zigler was an extraordinarily productive researcher and an effective advocate for the developmental model of research. His effort to broaden how we think about intellectual disabilities was influential.
For more than a decade my colleagues and I have been working to revive interest in theories of human needs. During that time, we empirically derived 16 such needs and presented scientific evidence of their reliability and validity. Everybody embraces all 16 needs, although we prioritize them differently. These priorities are what make us individuals.
Recently, we applied 12 human needs to a number of practical activities relevant to adolescents and adults with ID. We constructed two psychometric instruments, called the "Reiss Profile-MR/DD" and the newer "Reiss Profile of Human Needs." The 12 human needs applicable to ID are called need for acceptance, need for attention, need to eat, need to help others, need for independence, need to learn, need for order, need for physical activity, need for romance, need for social contact, need for tranquility, and need for vengeance. The main applications of this work are as follows.
1. Analysis of human needs make it possible to replace the language of disability (e.g., "person with ID") with the language of individuality (e.g., "friendly person"). We have new and powerful methods for training caregivers to recognize the human qualities of each individual they serve and to stop thinking of each person generically in terms of categories of disabilities.
2. The results of our psychometric assessments of human needs include numerous suggestions for improving quality of life and enhancing happiness for each individual evaluated. Needs analysis provides an essential supplement to what is called "person centered planning." As currently practiced, person centered planning is biased significantly because caregivers and others confuse their personal values for values held by the individual consumer with ID. Psychometric assessments of human needs based on multiple raters minimize the bias in person-centered and self-determination assessments.
3. Because people are happy when their needs are met, but unhappy when their needs are frustrated, analysis of a person's needs can show how to anticipate what might frustrate the individual and, thus, possibly trigger episodes of challenging behavior. By more completely addressing each individual's needs, some episodes of challenging behavior might be avoided. Thus, analysis of human needs represents a rare effort to study new ways of prevention of violence and challenging behavior in the ID population.
