Hello all,
Thank you for your quick and helpful responses regarding disability statistics. I would like to clarify the aims of my research and my approach to disability. I am blind myself and I am very much in support of social and environmental models of disability. The center with which I worked, the Colorado Center for the Blind, is also run by blind individuals and has a very progressive philosophy of disability as well. The "rehabilitation" of which I speak is the process of acquiring nonvisual skills such as use of Braille, independent travel with the long white cane and use of accessible computer technology. Perhaps "rehabilitation" was the wrong word to use. I need to make the case that training in such nonvisual skills is important for blind persons to realize their potential just as mastery of sign language is essential for many deaf individuals to realize their potential.
"Self-affirmation" also known as "values-affirmation" is an exercise in which individuals contemplate their important personal values. It helps people to more effectively manage psychological threats that come from the social environment, such as being part of a devalued minority group. One of my purposes in doing this research is to show that disability constitutes a negatively valued social identity and that coping with this social identity through self-affirmation can help people with disabilities to more fully realize their potential by being more receptive to training in alternative skills. In other words, our potential and ability to achieve is not fixed by our impairments but is shaped by our social environment and how we respond to it.
I absolutely agree that we should present theory and data in mainstream journals that critiques traditional medicalized notions of disability and I undertook this research as one way to show that social identity matters, and that interventions to aid coping with these social factors can have real benefits for the well-being and integration of persons with disabilities. I welcome your comments on this issue.
Best,
Arielle
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