Safety Hazards in Iranian Primary and Secondary School Textbooks of Children with Intellectual Disabilities: A Qualitative Content Analysis

Background and purpose: Child injuries are a growing global public health problem. Children are vulnerable toward hazards and this vulnerability will increase when the age intersects with other social determinants of health inequality such as disability, gender, and nationality. School textbooks are one of the main sources for teaching and learning in an education system. Iran is a country in Western Asia with a population of more than 83 million. There are 60170 students with ID in Iran, that is, 73% of students with disabilities including 37,305 boys and 22,865 girls. This study aimed to investigate the representation of safety in textbooks of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the education system in the context of Iran.

Methods: This study uses a content analysis method. All school textbooks for students with ID in the education year 2020-2021 in Iran were collected. Different keywords were used for extracting data from textbooks including cut, burn, animal bite, nose bleed, fractures, choking, road accidents, chemical hazards, electronic waste, pollution, and first aid. Data were analyzed qualitatively with MAXQDA 2018 software. The following data were extracted from the qualified textbooks: grade, textbook name, types of hazards, number of pages covering hazards, total pages of textbook, gender, and diversity. In this study, a narrative qualitative study was used for analysis. Categories were selected as the heading title of every subsection in the findings section. In addition, examples of each category are given in the form of a table in the text, which helps to better understand the content.

Findings: Among the 164 textbooks, 18 textbooks had content about hazards. These textbooks could be classified into four clusters including Natural sciences cluster, life skills cluster, social studies cluster, and Language cluster. Textbooks in all grades of primary and secondary schools had content about safety hazards. There are various topics in the textbooks including road safety, safety tips in the home for preventing hazards, fire, and workplace hazards.

Conclusion and Implications: In textbooks, risks are fully introduced to children. However, safety tips to prevent danger are not complete. First aid information is incomplete in textbooks. High school textbooks only address the risks in the workplace for men, which seem to have a neutral look at the issue of occupational and domestic hazards. It is needed a comprehensive framework for measuring presented safety knowledge in school textbooks of children with ID. It supports these children around the world to learn basic information on safety and reduce unintentional injuries among them. Children should have access to safety information through a variety of means, including textbooks. Decision-makers, researchers, and practitioners such as social workers at the global, national, and local levels must work to close gaps in the knowledge of children with ID about safety and, at the same time, reduce hazards. In other words, to reduce the risk, the child's vulnerability and exposure must be reduced. In addition, more research is needed for conduction evidence based interventions.