The Effects of the Level of Developmental Disability on Life Satisfaction: Examining the Mediation Effect of Disaster Safety Consciousness

Based on 2020 “A Survey on the status of people with disabilities” conducted by Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, we identified 7025 development people with disabilities and selected 3820 from this sample, which was used in our study. Our findings can be summarized as follows. Firstly, we found statistical differences in the level of developmental disability and disaster safety across gender, age, self-reported income percentiles, and education. Meanwhile, the difference in life satisfaction was only found in age, reported income percentiles, and education. We also found that men and those between the ages of 30 and 40 were more likely to have a positive view of disaster safety. While those that were self-reported to be part of the upper-income percentile have a more positive view of disaster safety. Meanwhile, the level of education was positively correlated with disaster safety. Secondly, we found that the level of developmental disability has a statistically significant association with life satisfaction. That is, a lower level of developmental disability suggested a higher level of life satisfaction. Thus, both the level of developmental disability and disaster safety had a positive association with life satisfaction. We also found that the low level of developmental disability is positively correlated with disaster safety and that disaster safety is positively correlated with life satisfaction. Meanwhile, the relative effect of disaster safety on life satisfaction was higher than that of the level of developmental disability. Thirdly, we found that the level of developmental disability has a direct effect on life satisfaction and that disaster safety mediates its effect on life satisfaction. That is, those that were reported to have high disaster safety tend to have higher life satisfaction. Our findings provided a few implications regarding the disaster safety of persons with a developmental disability.