Search results

The research for this study engages and assesses the relationship of the media from the 20th to the 21st century, combining scholar activism and public leadership in the disability rights movement. Having chronicled the disability rights movement from its roots, this chapter presents the discourse of media and movement, sampling mainstream media along with the advocacy and alternative media in support of disability rights. A range of media forms are engaged from advocacy bulletins to mainstream news media to public broadcasts that represent the diversity and complexity of the movement as it continues into the 21st century, pressing for the universalism of human rights for all.

We explore the effects and interplay of physical and social environments on the inaccessibility of gynecological health care for women with spinal cord injury. We also explore women’s responses to the inaccessibility of this care, in hopes of trying to understand better how women navigate their gynecological health and health care when faced with physical and social environmental constraints.

The data for this phenomenological study were gathered using in-depth, qualitative interviews with 20 women living with spinal cord injuries in or around Detroit, Michigan. Each interviewee was questioned about overall health and physical functioning, accessibility of doctor offices, interactions with health care providers, gynecological health-seeking behaviors, and complementary and alternative medicine use. In this paper we report on data on women’s difficulties in securing gynecological health care experiences and related attitudes and practices.

Findings echo past literature about the inaccessibility of doctor’s offices, including the lack of suitable exam tables and medical equipment. Office staff varied in their willingness to help transfer women from wheelchairs to exam tables as well, often creating what we term an inaccessible social environment. Individual women in our sample found different strategies for navigating the environmental contexts of a doctor’s office and the encounters that they had with providers within medical settings. These strategies had varying impacts on individuals’ abilities to secure gynecological health care.

Our findings point to the possibility of an interplay between and intersection of physical and social environments within medical settings that needs to be explored further and, potentially, the primary importance of the social environment over the physical environment in determining whether an individual’s disability makes health care inaccessible.

Sustaining a spinal cord injury (SCI) at any point in time is life-altering – physically, emotionally, and financially – for all persons affected by the injury, but it can place unique challenges on younger married couples. This study examines the transition to injury for 18 couples (ages 21–55). Data were collected using individual interviews with each partner at three time points following injury and observation in the rehabilitation setting (Creekview). This resulted in 96 individual interviews and 300 hours of observation. Using the life course perspective as a guiding theoretical framework and thematic analysis, I examined how the healthcare institution influenced the couples' relationship during their rehabilitation stay and the subsequent transition home. Creekview staff and couples accepted and reinforced the dominant cultural narrative that women are natural caregivers, but larger social structures of class, gender, and the division of paid and unpaid labor worked together to push some women into caregiving faster or prevented other women from engaging in caregiving. This study examines how younger couples move through the caregiving career during an off-time transition when the expected outcome is not long-term care placement or death. This study identified three main types of caregivers, each with their own path of caregiving – naturalized, constrained, and resistant caregivers. Overall, the transition to injury is complex and this study highlights some of the ways the marital relationship is affected by a nonnormative, unexpected transition.

Students with physical and health impairments represent a small but growing group of individuals with diverse educational needs. They are those students whose physical limitations or health problems interfere with school attendance or learning to such an extent that special services, training, equipment, materials, or facilities are required. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to discuss some of these impairments and acquaint both general and special educators with interventions for helping students with physical and health impairments succeed.

The “New Paradigm” of disability and the International Classification of Function Disability and Health both describe an ecological model of disability that has significantly influenced policy and law, and this model is frequently cited as a background in published research. Given the central role of “the environment” in this ecological model, we asked, what is the status of research on the environment and disability? Specifically, is a scoping review warranted in this area of research?

We conducted a “rapid scan” of the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC) database for articles reporting studies of the environment – defined as the arranged or built environment. We also scanned Google Scholar to ascertain the frequency of articles that might report research into the environment.

NARIC archived 12,486 items published from January 2007 to June 2012; 530 (4.2%) of which contained the search term “environment.” Of the 530 items, 78 (14.7%) also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF. Over the same time period, Google Scholar returned 109,000 entries to search terms “disability and environment,” 349 (0.3%) of which also included the terms architecture space, accessibility, and ICF.

This application of a method for rapidly assessing the status of the literature suggests that research into some aspects of the environment and disability may be under-represented. A more complete review, requiring more resources, is warranted.

The purpose of this study is to analyze public perceptions of disability and gain insight into the types of health conditions nondisabled people believe should be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Understanding how the public interprets the ADA could offer perspective on which disabilities are viewed as legitimate and which are not. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of members from local community groups and college classrooms in a metropolitan university setting. Our analyses evaluate the clustering of health condition types due to similar traits and identify which attributes of the health conditions generate this clustering. Results from a series of quantitative and qualitative analyses (e.g., hierarchical cluster analysis, frequency analysis, discourse analysis, etc.) indicate nondisabled respondents perceive physical and cognitive health conditions that are visible, static, and externally acquired as legitimate disabilities that should be protected by the ADA.

This chapter explores the challenges for the application of the concept of disability to other categories of oppression utilized in the notion of intersectionality.

The concept of intersectionality argues that oppression occurs within the contexts of class, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. We raise questions about the applicability of intersectionality to persons with disabilities. Using a Symbolic Interactionist approach to understand the matrix of domination or subordination, we examine how well disability as a category of disadvantage applies to intersectionality.

We argue that the fluid, heterogeneous, and discordant status characteristics, physicality, and diagnostic ambiguity of disability present a considerable challenge for the application of intersectionality as a useful paradigm for disability studies. While several ascribed statuses may contribute to the oppression of persons with disabilities, disability itself offers many unique challenges to understanding the intersection of these traits in the lives of these same people.

The conceptual uniqueness of disability produces rather complex methodological circumstances for understanding the social identity of persons with disabilities who are simultaneously members of additional categories of oppression. These complex and challenging methodological issues can best be met qualitatively, i.e., by approaching disability as lived experience.

For students of intersectionality, this chapter offers a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the concept of disability as a category of oppression.

A rich literature has documented gender-based differences in health care utilization and outcomes. The role of risk attitude in explaining the variations is limited at best. This study examines gender differences in health utilities and risk attitudes.

Data on 13 health states were collected from 629 students via questionnaires at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2005. From each respondent, we assessed utilities for a subset of health states, using Time Trade-Off and Standard Gamble. A risk attitude coefficient was calculated for each respondent as a function of their utilities for all outcomes assessed. The risk coefficient derived from a closed-form utility model for men was compared to that of women using the t-statistic.

There was a statistically significant difference in the risk attitudes of men and women. Men had a concave utility function, representing risk aversion, while women had a near linear utility function, suggesting that women are risk neutral.

Differences in risk attitude may be an important contributor to gender-based disparities in health services utilization. More research is needed to assess its full impact on decision-making in health care.

To understand how young men with disabilities react against overarching narratives of independence during the transition to adulthood in independent living and interdependent living arrangements with parents in order to address the gap between transition policy and real lived experience.

I use life history interviews and ethnographic “go-alongs” with nine men with mobility impairments to understand how they experience and make sense of independent living and interdependence during the transition to adulthood. Transcripts and field notes were analyzed using grounded theory methodology.

Data reveal diverging pathways participants took to interdependent living situation, rooting before transition, and returning during transition. These pathways are shaped by logics of residential decision-making: accessibility expectations and individual adaptability. Those who rooted before transition developed accessibility expectations that motivated them to remain living their parents’ homes while those who returned during transition relied on individual adaptability to overcome physical inaccessibility. Individual adaptability did not overcome inaccessibility – all returned to their parents’ homes. Pathways shape how each group of participants experienced and made sense of interdependent living arrangements and independent living. Those who rooted before transition found interdependence to be a route to increased independence, and did not consider independent living a marker of adulthood. Those who returned during transition found that the interdependence they experienced increased feelings of dependence.

Experiences and meanings emerging adults with disabilities have during the transition to adulthood reveal the complexity of interdependence and independent living. The pathways and the social forces shaping those pathways to interdependent living arrangements have implications for life course theory and disability policy.

Mental disorders are common and associated with substantial levels of work disability. Relative to persons with most types of physical impairments, persons with mental disorders have lower employment rates and lower mean wages, and experience greater discrimination in the workplace (Baldwin, 1999, 2000; Baldwin & Johnson, 1995, 2000). Persons with mental disorders have lower socioeconomic status, on average, and greater risk of living in poverty, than persons with physical disorders (Dohrenwend et al., 1992). By 1999, mental disorders had supplanted back cases as the health condition most frequently cited in employment discrimination charges filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Moss et al., 1999).