Life satisfaction of disabled people employed in public service: The example of the Ministry of Family and Social Services of the Republic of Türkiye

The issue of disability has been in a negative process in the historical process of the West until the middle of the 20th century, and the mentality transformation, which includes radical changes in political and social terms, has been implemented in this field within the early 21st century in Türkiye's case. Rights-based social policies to be implemented in order to take protective and preventive measures against the social risks that may occur for disabled individuals and to increase their quality of life are important in terms of participation of disabled individuals in working life, and active employment policies developed in this context contribute to the increase of life satisfaction of disabled individuals. In this context, it is important to address the life satisfaction of individuals with disabilities who are employed in the Ministry of Family and Social Services, which is the main regulatory public institution on disability in the research. For this reason, the aim of the research is to measure the life satisfaction of disabled people employed in the public sector; the hypothesis is that the life satisfaction of working disabled people has a positive course besides some negative factors. This hypothesis has been researched around the basic problematic of how the life satisfaction of the disabled people working within the Ministry is. The scope of the research was limited to the province of Istanbul in terms of its population and the the number of employees, and the personnel working in the Istanbul Provincial Directorate of the Ministry of Family and Social Services and its affiliates were determined as the research universe; while the sample is 32 disabled employees. In the research, in-depth interviews based on semi-structured questions were carried out as a method, and the the findings were subjected to content analysis of the interview texts with the "simultaneous coding" method.. The research findings emerged over four different themes: personal factors affecting the motivation of disabled people, the profile of disabled people in working life, the adaptation of disabled people to social life, and the perception and expectations of disabled people regarding current economic situation. As a result, although there is mostly a positive situation for different reasons in the life satisfaction of disabled employees in each theme, the presence of negative elements from time to time has been identified.