Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it: Volume 9

Cover of Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it
Subject:

Table of contents

(13 chapters)
Purpose

Disability as a consequential social characteristic has not drawn sociologists’ contemporary attention in the way that race, class, gender, and sexuality have. In order to understand why, it is instructive to analyze how disability has been framed since the inception of the American Sociological Society, now known as the American Sociological Association.

Methodology/approach

Our findings are based on an intensive, systematic, and comprehensive content analysis of 10 years of the Proceedings from the American Sociology Society’s Annual Meetings, 1906–1915.

Findings

Three key themes emerged from the content analysis of the proceedings of the first 10 years of the papers delivered at the Annual Meetings (1906–1915). First, people with disabilities were largely invisible in those papers. Second, influenced strongly by a social reform agenda which stressed progress and the powerful eugenics movement of the time, those early presenters who addressed people with disabilities in their papers vilified them. Third, their denigration was met largely with silence in the printed commentary which followed in the proceedings.

Research implications

In order to understand the present limited attention to disability, researchers need to know the historical context.

Originality/value

Although there have been a number of thoughtful books, edited volumes and review essays exploring the history of the discipline of sociology, none of them have attended to the history of disability within the field. This paper contributes to that historical understanding.

Purpose

This paper attempts to put Goffman’s writings about disability in Stigma into the context of his own writings as well as into the context of current concepts of disability.

Methodology/approach

This is a critical review of historical literature in Sociology.

Social implications

The paper suggests how Goffman’s writings can underpin a concept of disability as a fluid and active state rather than a passive and stigmatized state.

Originality/value

By putting Goffman’s writings into an historical context within the development of the field of sociology, the paper shows that some of the ways in which disability advocates and scholars tend to denigrate his writings are really a misinterpretation.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the value and critiques of Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma as well as the emotion work needed to learn the lessons it has to teach.

Methodology/approach

I use a personal narrative grounded in my experience as a member of the “wise” category (the mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy) and observations of the reactions of my disabled students as a vehicle for taking the reader inside the experience of the trials and tribulations of reading Goffman as a member of “marked” social categories and the more humanizing experience of reading Spencer Cahill’s work.

Findings

There remains much to be learned from reading Goffman’s Stigma. In many ways his work has set the stage for approaches to the study of disability that we are still discovering. Learning these lessons through is made difficult by the de-humanizing perspective Goffman brings to the work. He clearly locates himself and his readers in the category of “we the normals” who see the stigmatized as “not quite fully human.” For disabled students and scholars and their families, reading Goffman requires a good deal of emotion management. Reading Spencer Cahill’s work can help in that process. Goffman presents disabled students and scholars and their family members with confirmation of what we know to be true about our marked and not quite human status in the eyes of others and in the process gives us our “own.” Cahill helps us all see ourselves in the strangeness that is inside social life. There is great value in both.

Purpose

As sociologists we all try to make a contribution to our field. Having completed our comprehensives and dissertations we have read in depth in several areas, have focused on an area that interests us, and have learned the research process whether it uses quantitative or qualitative methodology. We all make our contributions available to the field, but occasionally one among us makes a startling discovery, has an unusual idea or a way to approach a problem, starts examining a new problem at just the right moment, or has an insight into a specific conceptual problem with unusual alacrity. A few among us combine all that skill and happenstance and lead the way into new sociological insights, new areas of research and provide a notable foundation or advancement to an area of knowledge. Saad Nagi is one of those contributors with vision, insight, and skill to see ahead of his time. This paper attempts to bring together in one place his major contributions to the disability knowledge base in sociology.

Methodology/approach

The approach used in this paper is an in depth review of all of Nagi’s published works in the area of disability. The published literature is grouped into the five areas in which Nagi made major contributions, including major research of the Social Security Disability Insurance process; development of a framework for the disability process; epidemiological definitions and research; development of a coherent set of disability measures; and an examination of the social problem, policy, and program process as developed and practiced in this country.

Findings

Nagi made a large and significant contribution in all the areas listed above and much of the measurement, and process examination is still relevant and useful in current research. His framework is still the basis for the very newest models of disability which dominate disability research today.

Research implications

Researchers need to go back to find Nagi books and articles written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to ground their work in the originals rather than to take the interpretations of others on this material. The ICF and the Social Model did not originate in Europe alone, but much of the work began in the states in the early 60s with the work of Nagi, Haber, and others and should not be overlooked or ignored.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the tenuous relationship between medical sociology and disability studies, particularly as it relates to the work of Irving Zola.

Findings

Many attribute the division between these disciplines to their starkly different and oft competing approaches to disability; however, I argue that a closer examination reveals a number of commonalities between the two.

Implications

I use Irving K. Zola’s extensive body of scholarship to demonstrate the connections between these divergent approaches to disability, and imagine what his legacy has to offer to the advancement of a diverse sociology of disability.

Value

Neither focus is more correct than the other, as considering these bodies of work together presents a number of opportunities to advance a more comprehensive sociological theory – not just of disability – but of ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression as well.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to review the legacy of sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola in bringing the body into social science research and making visible and dismantling social structured barriers to hearing and speaking and living as fully human.

Methodology/approach

It begins with an examination of Zola’s experience of “being sexy” in his book, Missing Pieces (1982). It considers what a visual sociological focus on “being sexy” can contribute to understanding structured barriers to living as fully human after the emergence of this field in the 1990s and 2000s.

Research implications

It provides two examples of the use of video cameras in understanding the daily experiences of adults using wheelchairs and children with asthma that continue the embodied work begun by Zola.

Social implications

Embodied sociological research can be a strategy for social and political change.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

Methodology/approach

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

Findings

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Originality/value

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review of investigations into the specific disability of deafness in the field of sociology and other closely related fields.

Methodology/approach

After a pilot search using databases appropriate to social science research, we developed key search terms and, using an inductive approach, we identified major themes in the literature.

Findings

Our review shows that deafness has been investigated for a long time in sociology and other related fields, that there is a wide range of themes in scholarly work on the experiences of deaf communities and deaf people, and that conceptualizations of deafness and d/Deaf communities have changed over time. We organize this paper around six major themes we identified, and a few highlighted pieces of scholarship illustrate these themes along the way. We particularly focus on scholarship from the late 1960s through the early 1990s as emblematic of seismic shifts in studying deafness, although we do highlight little known nineteenth century work as well.

Research implications

This paper captures the legacy of this past scholarship and reveals that deafness is a rich site of inquiry that can contribute to the field of sociology. It is also a valuable resource for any future sociological research into deafness, deaf people, and deaf communities. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, commentary on the extent to which previous scholarship on the sociology of deafness has or has not figured into current scholarship and suggestions for future research.

Purpose

This paper was written to show that what has come to be called the social model of disability appeared as the primary analytical framework in research published by sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the name and constructs of the model have changed over the years, its roots are clearly present in the earlier sociological literature. The author looked for evidence of these roots.

Methodology/approach

The paper’s findings are based on a literature review and synthesis. For illustrative purposes, four publications were selected as case examples.

Findings

All of the components of the social model – locus of the problem in society, activism as a solution, and consumer control – appeared in the earlier literature. In addition, these studies conducted in the 1970s and earlier distinguished between the individual and social model, although they used different terminology.

Research implications

Researchers need to go beyond simple electronic literature searches in order to find books and articles written prior to 1980. Otherwise, they may be “reinventing the wheel.”

Originality/value

Most recent literature in disability studies acknowledges a debt to the social model theorists of the 1990s. This paper suggests that their debt extends back much further and that the social model is part of a long tradition of sociological thinking.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine early sociological research on the experience of non-impaired siblings in families of children with disabilities for evidence of an approach consistent with aspects of the social model of disability.

Methodology/approach

Due to the historical nature of this special issue, this work examines research published over a 30-year period beginning with the 1960s and ending with the late 1980s. After an extensive literature search, a mixture of 51 quantitative and qualitative studies on the sibling experience was included in the sample.

Findings

Findings indicate that while the focus of much of the early research on the non-impaired sibling experience was on the negative impact of having a sibling with impairments, there were some exceptions in early sociological studies that highlighted the impact of structural barriers and cultural attitudes on sibling adjustment. In particular, results of early studies showed that the transmission of inclusionary attitudes within the family unit can improve the lives of siblings.

Purpose

This paper presents an updated summary of a meta-analysis of qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years. In this summary, we explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training are reflected in research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research. The detailed findings of the original analysis were published in Volume 7 of Research in Social Science and Disability.

Methodology/approach

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 79 peer-reviewed qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

Findings

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Originality/value

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities. The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

Cover of Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it
DOI
10.1108/S1479-354720179
Publication date
2016-12-17
Book series
Research in Social Science and Disability
Editors
Series copyright holder
Emerald Publishing Limited
ISBN
978-1-78635-478-5
eISBN
978-1-78635-477-8
Book series ISSN
1479-3547