Defining Disability: Understandings of and Attitudes Towards Ableism and Disability

Abstract

Disabled people, amidst political and social gains, continue to experience discrimination in multiple areas. Understanding how such discrimination, named here as ableism, operates is important and may require studying perspectives of people who do not claim a disability identity. Ableism may be expressed in a number of ways, and examining how a particular group, in this case siblings of disabled people, understand and value disability may contribute to overall understandings about how ableism works. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore relationships between siblings of disabled people's broad societal understandings of disability and their attitudes towards it. In order to tease out this relationship further we have also examined factors that impact how people define disability. Using both social psychological and sociological approaches, we have contextualized individual attitudes as providing additional new information about social meanings of disability, and set this study's results against the larger backdrops of debates over meanings of disability within Disability Studies. In our research, participants revealed complex understandings of disability, but most often defined disability as preventing or slowing action, as an atypical function, a lack of independence, and as a socially constructed obstacle. Participants' unconscious (implicit) disability attitudes significantly related to their understandings of disability as lacking independence, impairment, and/or in relation to the norm, and their conscious (explicit) disability attitudes. Moreover, longer employment in a disability-related industry was correlated with defining disability as a general difference, rather than as slowing or limiting of tasks.

Daily life in National Disability Insurance Scheme times: Parenting a child with Down syndrome and the disability politics in everyday places

“…Yet ableist discourse remains widespread, where bodily difference is de-valued and a bodily standard of normal constructs distance from people with disability (Campbell, 2008b). Ableism can be expressed through conscious or unconscious attitudes (Friedman and Owen, 2017; Wolbring, 2008). In encounters in everyday places, people may be well-meaning yet engage in ableist discourse without recognising its oppressive implications.…”

Explicit Associations with Autism and Disability

“…self-report rating scale, participants self-generated associations with the labels for a person on the autism spectrum (a specific disability), a person with a disability, a person not on the autism spectrum, a person without a disability, and four other comparison individuals in Phase 1, and rated the valence of the most common associations in Phase 2. Selfgenerated associations have been used to study disability 32 and puzzle pieces as part of a study on autism puzzle piece logos 33 ; however, the free responses have previously been coded by the researchers. This approach allowed us to examine the valence of explicit attitudes toward individuals on the autism spectrum compared with other groups of people instead of comparing change in attitudes due to an intervention 16,18,19,[26][27][28][29] or change due to the presence of a diagnostic label.…”

Psychological Sexual Health of People with Paraplegia

“…These two myths arise from a disability model that is often known as the medical model of disability [11,12], whereby people are deemed disabled due to their medical condition or impairment [13,14]. Therefore, disability is understood as an individual inability to conform to a standard of normality, namely when the abnormality occurs within the person [15], making him/ her different from the majority of people [16].…”